WCLC Sept 2021 | Lung cancer screening in Latin America
Ricardo Sales dos Santos, MD, PhD, Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital, São Paulo, Brazil, discusses the current state of lung cancer screening in Latin America. The differences in socio-economic status across Brazil is a key challenge facing the uptake of lung cancer screening, as is the lack of transportation for CT scanning. While smoking prevalence has reduced dramatically in recent decades, former smokers remain at a high risk of developing lung cancer so work is ongoing to minimize burden in this population. This interview took place at the World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) 2021.
Transcript (edited for clarity)
We will be talking about the situation of lung cancer screening in Latin America. Of course, the situation when you see Latin America is a large region, I’m located in Brazil. My name is Ricardo. I work here as a thoracic surgeon and we organized the first trial of lung cancer screening years ago in 2013. We published, in 2016, the first Brazilian lung trial. And the challenges to do that were many, many, many...
We will be talking about the situation of lung cancer screening in Latin America. Of course, the situation when you see Latin America is a large region, I’m located in Brazil. My name is Ricardo. I work here as a thoracic surgeon and we organized the first trial of lung cancer screening years ago in 2013. We published, in 2016, the first Brazilian lung trial. And the challenges to do that were many, many, many. First of all, we have social and economical situations in the country, in different regions. They work in different ways. There are places where there is a lack of clean water, there are places that we have violence as also a problem. So when you think about lung cancer screening sometimes it’s not a priority for that population.
And our smoking prevalence in Brazil and in many countries in Latin America are going down. And if you see back in the nineties, we have like 50% of the population were smoking, now we are about 15%. But anyway, all those former smokers, they still have a high risk, and that’s what we are trying to minimize the burden of lung cancer when you see this population.
So it’s challenging because people, sometimes they don’t have transportation to go for, or have a CT scan. And that’s why we are trying to, actually we are starting to organize a truck with a CT scan inside that we can go for small cities. But when you see the situation on lung cancer in the whole region of Latin America, there is about 60 to 70,000 people with lung cancer. Half of them will be located in Brazil. We have here about 30,000 deaths from lung cancer each year. Maybe these numbers should be higher, but places that we don’t have the diagnosis, so people will die without the diagnosis, but anyway it’s still being the first cause of death due to cancer, just like in North America, in the whole world.
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