[Screening for lung cancer]

Bronchial cancer is the ideal candidate for the application of screening strategies: it is a serious, frequent disease and its diagnosis is often delayed. Moreover, only the early stages of the disease offer high hopes of being cured. However, proof of the impact of screening has not been supplied either by X-ray or by cytological examination of expectorations, despite numerous open and subsequent randomised trials. Recently, the low dose scan has shown to be a technique far more sensitive than X-ray and capable of detecting early stage tumours. Nevertheless, it is also a barely specific examination revealing a great number of benign abnormalities and perhaps leading to futile examinations. Because of this, the eventual demonstration of the impact of the scan on the lung cancer mortality warrants the development of randomised trials.