Lung Cancer Mortality and the Availability of Chest Computerized Tomography: A Longitudinal Nationwide Study

Abstract

Lung-cancer screening with chest computerized tomography (CT) is not easy to introduce in low-medium resource countries due to cost issues. We investigated whether the increasing availability of chest CT exams in Brazil, in spite of no lung-cancer screening protocol, was associated with lung-cancer death rate along 10-year follow-up. We performed regressions to estimate the rate ratio between chest CT exams and lung-cancer deaths per 10⁵ inhabitants. We stratified data per municipality. Regressions were adjusted for physicians and hospital beds per 10⁵ inhabitants and per capita gross domestic product. Increasing availability of chest CT exams predicted decreasing lung-cancer death rate.

Keywords: Cancer; diagnosis; mortality; screening.