Leeds Lung Health Check, funded by Yorkshire Cancer Research and delivered in partnership with the Trust and the University of Leeds, helped pave the way for a national lung screening programme, set to be fully rolled out by the Government by 2030.
An anticipated £270 million will be spent delivering nearly a million scans every year across England, with the aim of saving hundreds of lives, including in Yorkshire, where lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death.
Yorkshire Cancer Research hosted a celebration event bringing together key partners, employees, volunteers and supporters to celebrate the successes of the trial which, as one of the largest lung screening trials in the UK, has screened over 8,800 people and detected 400 cancers since 2018.
Of the lung cancers detected by the lung health checks, 80% were found at an early stage. The number rose to 88% in the trial’s second round of screening, meaning hundreds of lives in Yorkshire have potentially been saved.
Lung screening is vital as cancer can be found at the earliest possible opportunity, when there are often more treatment options available. When detected at stage 1, 68% of people with lung cancer live past five years, compared to 9% of people who are diagnosed at stage 4.
Someone whose life was potentially saved by the trial is David Sutcliffe, 74, who was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer in 2022 after visiting the unit. He had surgery to remove the tumour and needed no further treatment.
He said: “Thanks to early detection and intervention, I was officially cancer-free after one keyhole surgery. In a matter of weeks, I was completely recovered, and it didn’t feel as if I’d had lung cancer at all.
“Lung screening not only saved my life but also gave me the opportunity to walk my granddaughter to primary school for the first time, in her new uniform. I was thrilled to hear about the national lung screening programme, because it means many more people can survive lung cancer and experience those same joyful moments.”
The Leeds Lung Health Check invited people in Leeds for a chest scan in a mobile screening unit, which visited convenient community locations like supermarket car parks to make it easier for people to attend. Targeted mobile lung checks like this have since been introduced to areas in Yorkshire with a high lung cancer mortality rate, such as Hull and parts of South Yorkshire.
Professor Mat Callister, Lead Consultant in Respiratory Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Honorary Professor at the University of Leeds, said: “The trial provided key data and evidence to demonstrate to the government that lung screening is feasible in the UK and offers value for money for the NHS as a whole. We were able to demonstrate that over half of all people who are invited to a lung health check will accept the invitation and turn up. That was critical data that was unique to this clinical trial, providing the government with what it needed to understand how to make this work on a national scale.”
We’re very grateful for the thousands of people in Leeds who agreed to be part of the trial. They played a crucial role in paving the way to the national programme, which will now be offered to hundreds of thousands more people in the region.”