[Guidelines for the early diagnosis of lung cancer for primary care physicians]

Lung cancer is a serious/medical and social problem. It belongs to the most common cancers. In the past decades, lung cancer has steadily held a leading place in the structure of cancer morbidity and mortality in our country and in the majority of European countries. Cigarette smoking remains to be the major if not only risk factor for lung cancer. Many attempts were previously made to set up systems for the early (timely) lung cancerdetection in risk groups through cytological and radiological examinations. Prophylactic fluorography and X-ray study have long been an important screening procedure in Russia and foreign countries. Recently this procedure has transformed into digital lung radiography. However, there have been no conclusive proofs for its efficiency in the early detection of lung cancer for a few decades. In the past decade, large-scale prospective randomized trials of low-dose computed tomography (CT) have been performed to screen lung cancer. These have shown that this technology can potentially reduce mortality from this disease. This encouraging result has caused a substantial change in the tactics of examining people at high risk for lung cancer. CT has fully replaced linear tomography and all others special X-ray procedures in the verified diagnosis of lung cancer. The indications for pre-examination CT have been considerably expanded in patients with X-ray detected pathology. The tactics for estimating the small lung tissue foci found at CT has been changed. Availability of CT, clear clinical indications for the study, and observance of the standard procedure have become important elements of the entire system for the early identification of lung cancer. These clinical recommendations largely deal just with organizational and methodological issues. The authors hope that the recommendations will serve as a guide for primary care physicians (therapists, pulmonologists,and radiologists) in the early diagnosis of lung cancer and in the optimization of patient routing from the detection of its early symptoms to surgical, radiation, and drug treatments.