Tag Archive for: lung cancer risk

Veteran Lung Cancer Risk | Understanding Exposures and Screening Protocols

Veteran Lung Cancer Risk: Understanding Exposures and Screening Protocols from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What’s important for veterans to know about lung cancer risk? Expert Dr. Drew Moghanaki from UCLA Health discusses known veteran lung cancer risk factors, screening recommendations, and proactive patient advice involving the PACT Act.

[ACT]IVATION TIP

“…if you’ve had an office job, well, you probably have the same risk as your neighbor wherever you’re living. But if you were in a combat zone or on a base where there were a lot of chemicals, probably want to pay a little more attention and check in with your primary care doctor to get some appropriate screening tests for yourself.”

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Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

Dr. Moghanaki, there is a stigma around military personnel being at higher risk for lung cancer than civilians. Is there an elevated risk for those in the military? If so, why and who should be screened?

Dr. Drew Moghanaki:

Yeah, the stigma of veterans being at higher risk for lung cancer is real. And I think Hollywood had a big role in it. And is it appropriate? Well, I never liked the word stigma, but I think it’s important for the public. And of course, soldiers or any military personnel who served in the armed forces appreciates that back in the days the bases were much dirtier than they are today. And there was a lot of exposure to a lot of things that can cause cancer and actually other health problems as well, such as diabetes and Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s and other things.

So yes, it’s true that our veterans, especially if they were working around toxic chemicals or in the Middle East, where the open burn pits were leading to inhalation of a lot of toxic fumes, that these folks are at a higher risk and should be more proactive with any symptoms. So if you’re just a 45-year-old, 55-year-old male or female, and you’ve got a cough, generally speaking, you may not be so worried and just hope it goes away.

But if you’ve been on these dirty bases, it’s important to look into this and find out now how dirty are the bases? Well, there’s been the media I think over exaggerates exactly what was going on and what was on these bases. But there are lots of federal reports that have documented exactly some of the, for example, like if you were stripping aircraft with a certain stripping material, a lot of these substances are currently now chemicals are banned because we as soon as we learn that they’re toxic, we basically ban them.

But generally speaking, yeah, health concerns are a little bit elevated if you’ve served in the military and especially if you’ve been deployed in the field of battle. And so my activation tip is if you’ve had an office job, well, you probably have the same risk as your neighbor wherever you’re living. But if you were in a combat zone or on a base where there were a lot of chemicals, probably want to pay a little more attention and check in with your primary care doctor to get some appropriate screening tests for yourself.

Lisa Hatfield:

Are there any programs in place right now where veterans who’ve had those exposures or potential exposures, where they are being screened regularly or is it up to the veteran to ask that question?

Dr. Drew Moghanaki:

So if a veteran is plugged in with the VA healthcare system, the primary care network here is set up to offer the appropriate screening. But if you’re not, it’s important to look into this. Again, I’m just going to keep saying over and over again, if you’re a veteran who’s not yet eligible, if you know anyone, please check in. Congress has radically expanded the eligibility within the PACT Act is actually primarily centered around this issue of risk. It’s about toxic exposures that the VA is still learning about and VA physicians like myself are still learning about. And so these programs definitely exist to address them, but the best way to do it is to get registered for VA healthcare.


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Can Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Help Advance Screening for Lung Cancer?

Can Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Help Advance Screening for Lung Cancer? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

How will lung cancer personalized medicine be improved with advanced technologies? Expert Dr. Lecia Sequist explains how artificial intelligence and machine learning help advance screening for lung cancer and shares advice for patients.

Dr. Sequist is program director of Cancer Early Detection & Diagnostics at Massachusetts General Hospital and also The Landry Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

[ACT]IVATION TIP:

“… if you are 50 and you have smoked in the past, I would urge you to talk to your doctor about whether you can access lung cancer screening. But if you’re younger or you haven’t smoked in the past, you can’t access lung cancer screening right now. And we’re hoping to change that with AI that can really help figure out who is at risk of this disease.”

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Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

Dr. Sequist, technology is advancing at such a fast pace, and we’re hearing words like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I just read an article about a team that you’ve been working with that is developing or has developed an AI model that can detect future lung cancer risk. I believe it’s based on CT scans. Can you speak to that a little bit more and also talk a little bit more about where you see this AI technology taking cancer research and predicting cancer and also any challenges that we might face with AI and machine learning in healthcare?

Dr. Lecia Sequist:

Yeah. AI seems to be everywhere. You turn on the news or you look at your phone, and it’s talking about AI. And some of it seems scary, and Hollywood doesn’t help because there’s lots of movies about computers or robots kind of taking over the human race. And I think we have to separate Hollywood from real life. Artificial intelligence or machine learning, it’s a very general term. It can mean a lot of different things depending on what the context is. But it’s basically just a tool for understanding patterns. And we all understand patterns in our own life or our own house. I personally know that my dog is going to want to, as soon as we wake up in the morning, is going to want to go outside and then is going to want to have some food, and there are different patterns that you know in your daily life that you recognize, and you can anticipate what’s going to happen next.

AI is a tool that helps us anticipate what’s going to happen next for patterns that are way more complex than, yeah, your dog’s going to want to go outside and eat some food. So computers can sometimes pick up patterns that the human brain can’t really pick up, because they’re just too complicated. And that’s what we’ve found in our research. One of the vaccine things about lung cancer and trying to figure out how we can prevent lung cancer or find it at the earliest stage when it’s most curable is that it’s very hard to know who’s at risk. We know that lung cancer is one of the most common cancers out there, but knowing who is truly at risk and separating one person from the next is not so simple.

In the past, it’s mainly been, you know, determined by whether or not you ever smoke cigarettes. And it’s true that cigarette smoking is one risk factor for lung cancer, but it’s not the only one. And we don’t fully understand what all the risk factors might be, but we know that there are people who have smoked a lot in their life and never get lung cancer. And on the flip side, we know that there’s people who have never smoked or who maybe quit 30, 40 years ago and will still get lung cancer. And how do we know who’s at risk? That’s what we tried to solve with our research that I worked on with my colleagues at Mass General Hospital where I work and also at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is just down the road from us. And so we brought together our medical knowledge and our computer knowledge and tried to come up with a way to predict for any given individual person, are they at risk for lung cancer.

By looking at their lungs and not looking at the lungs the way a human radiologist sort of says, okay, there’s the right lung, there’s the left lung, and they’re looking for things that already exist like a tumor or a mass. The computer looks at a different type of pattern that human eyes and brains can’t really recognize and has learned the pattern, because we trained the computer with thousands and tens of thousands of scans where we knew this person went on to develop cancer and this one didn’t. And the computer learned the pattern of risk. And so using an X-ray or a CAT scan to predict future risk is something a little different. In medicine, we usually use an X-ray to say, okay, what’s happening now? Why does this patient have a fever? Why is this patient bleeding? And using an X-ray or a CAT scan in this case to predict the future is kind of a new thought for doctors. But we think that it could be a really valuable tool to help us understand who’s at risk for many different kinds of diseases. We happen to look at lung cancer, but I think you could use this idea for other diseases too.

Lisa Hatfield:

So will this AI model become mainstream anytime soon if a patient wants to access that? Or is it only being used for research purposes?

Dr. Lecia Sequist:

Well, we do before we start to offer anything mainstream or as part of routine care, we really need to understand how it can be used to help patients. So we are running some clinical trials right now to try and understand, is this a tool that could be used, for example, to give someone access to lung cancer screening? Because right now, if you want to have lung cancer screening, which is a very effective screening test to try and find cancer in people who feel completely well, trying to find cancer at the earliest stage before it has spread, can we give people access to lung cancer screening by using this AI test? Right now and if you want to get lung cancer screening, you have to be 50 or older, and you have to have smoked in the past. And if that fits your, if you are 50 and you have smoked in the past, I would urge you to talk to your doctor about whether you can access lung cancer screening. But if you’re younger or you haven’t smoked in the past, you can’t access lung cancer screening right now. And we’re hoping to change that with AI that can really help figure out who is at risk of this disease.

Lisa Hatfield:

Thank you. I’m excited to see where this goes in the future. 


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