In the News: Foundation Advisor Christine Berg Makes Case for Rethinking Lung Cancer Screening Policy

Christine D. Berg, M.D., Senior Clinical Advisor to the Susan Wojcicki Foundation, published a guest commentary in The Cancer Letter making the case for why U.S. lung cancer screening policy needs to evolve as quickly as the science does.

Dr. Berg led the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), the study that established the eligibility criteria most U.S. screening guidelines still use today: a history of heavy smoking within a defined age range. 

In her essay, Dr. Berg traces how those criteria, while appropriate based on the evidence generated by the trial at the time, have left a growing share of lung cancer patients without a path to early detection, including an increasing number of people who have never smoked. In fact, an analysis she conducted in 2012 with her National Cancer Institute colleague Paul Pinsky found that less than a third of U.S. lung cancer patients would have been eligible for screening under the original NLST criteria. 

This shows why it’s so important to expand screening guidelines: We can help more people detect lung cancer earlier, when it is most treatable.

Read the full op-ed in The Cancer Letter and learn more about our research priorities.