Blood Test to Identify Individuals for Lung Cancer Screening
Kristin Jenkins
July 16, 2018
A relatively simple blood test could refine current lung cancer screening eligibility criteria and help identify more high-risk individuals for low-dose CT (LDCT), according to an international research group.
The blood test measures levels of four circulating proteins. The measures are then used to calculate a lung cancer risk score.
A blinded external validation study found that this test discriminated more accurately between future cases of lung cancer and control cases than a traditional smoking history–based risk model and current US screening criteria.
The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) currently recommends LDCT screening for lung cancer in ever-smokers with a 30 pack-year history who have not smoked for up to 15 years, the researchers note. However, individuals eligible for screening represent fewer than 50% of incident lung cancer cases.
“Biomarker-based risk profiling has the potential to improve eligibility criteria for lung cancer screening,” say the researchers, from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyons, France.
“There is an urgent need to improve lung cancer risk assessment because current screening criteria miss a large proportion of cases,” the study authors write. “This study provided a proof of principle in showing that a panel of circulating protein biomarkers may improve lung cancer risk assessment and may be used to define eligibility for computed tomography screening.”
A report on their collaborative study, which was part of the Integrative Analysis of Lung Cancer Etiology and Risk (INTEGRAL) Consortium for Early Detection of Lung Cancer, was published online July 12 in JAMA Oncology.
Study Details
The biomarker-based risk assessment tool consists of a panel of four proteins: cancer antigen 125; carcinoembryonic antigen; cytokeratin-19 fragment; and the precursor of surfactant protein B.
The researchers developed it using prediagnostic blood samples from US patients at high risk for lung cancer. These included 108 ever-smoking patients for whom lung cancer had been diagnosed within 1 year after blood collection, and 216 smoking-matched control patients from the Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial (CARET) cohort.
To validate the tool, absolute risk estimates were used for 63 ever-smoking patients for whom lung cancer had been diagnosed within 1 year after blood collection. These patients were matched with 90 control patients from the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study and the Northern Sweden Health and Disease Study (NSHDS). Mean age of the patients was 58 years; 69% were men.
The researchers then combined the biomarker score with data on smoking exposure. Using this integrated risk prediction model, they identified 40 of the 63 incident lung cancer cases, or 63% of future lung cancer cases, for LDCT screening. This corresponded to a sensitivity of 0.63.