Lung cancer screening: What women need to know

With fewer smokers today, the number of Americans getting lung cancer has dropped. However, the decline has been slower in women. Not only are they diagnosed, on average, at a younger age than men, but multiple studies have found that women between the ages of 30 and 49 are developing the disease at higher rates compared to men in the same age group. November is lung cancer awareness month: In this episode, lung cancer experts Brett Bade, MD, and Nagashree Seetharamu, MD, MBBS, join host Sandra Lindsay, RN, to discuss the alarming trend in women and to raise awareness about lung cancer screening in general; currently, less than 10% of people who should be checked for lung cancer actually get screened. Learn the criteria for screening, what the scan is like and how to lower the risk of developing the disease.

Read more about this episode on the Northwell Newsroom.

Chapters: 

• 02:34 - Lung cancer risk factors
• 03:32 - Health effects of smoking
• 04:11 - Second hand smoking
• 05:14 - Are there early signs of lung cancer? 
• 05:54 - What is lung cancer screening?
• 07:37 - Low-dose CT lung cancer screening
• 08:27 - Who is eligible for screening?
• 08:50 - What if you don't qualify for screening but have a risk factor?
• 10:31 - What barriers to screening exist?
• 11:28 - Low screening numbers
• 12:45 - Lung cancer in young women
• 14:15 - Sex differences in lung cancer
• 14:34 - Differences in lung cancer in women
• 15:41 - EGFR mutation and lung cancer
• 16:19 - EGFR, Asian woman and lung cancer
• 17:13 - Breaking down racial disparities
• 18:49 - Barriers to lung cancer screening

About the experts:

• Dr. Bade is a pulmonologist and the director of the Lung Cancer Screening Program at Lenox Hill Hospital (Patients and providers can call 844-544-5864).
• Dr. Seetharamu is the head of thoracic and head and neck oncology for Northwell Health. She maintains an active clinical practice at the R.J. Zuckerberg Cancer Center, specializing in cancers of the head and neck and thoracic malignancies (lung cancer, mesothelioma, thymic tumors). She is also Associate Professor of Medicine at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.

Read Dr. Bade's op-ed on lung cancer screening guidelines.