Sebastian Schmidt: Yesterday, one of my highlights at the WCLC23 was the presentation of Jens Vogel-Claussen about the interim results of the HANSE study.

Quoting Sebastian Schmidt, Head of Strategy, Innovation, and Medical Affairs in the Computed Tomography Business Line at Siemens Healthineers, on LinkedIn:

”Lung Cancer Screening: First results from the HANSE study. Yesterday, one of my highlights at the WCLC23 was the presentation of Jens Vogel-Claussen about the interim results of the HANSE study.

Main takeaways:

– First round of CT screening successfully completed (>5000 scans). Great.
– >60 cancers detected, above expectations (>1.5% 5-years incidence)
– About two thirds of detected cancers in early stage (I/II). Good result, remember that the results in later (incidence) rounds are better than in the first (prevalence) round, where you see a lot of pre-existing late-stage cancers. Same order of magnitude as the large trials (NELSON etc).
– Self-assessment of participants correlated almost perfectly with physician’s assessment (~1% deviation) – shows that self-assessment is a valid tool for risk detemination
– The PLCO2012 risk model performs better than the NELSON risk model. Not surprising, it includes 10 years more of experience.

This another successful lung screening program, and especially important that it shows feasibility of lung cancer screening within the German healthcare system.

The results on PLCO vs NELSON may encourage the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection to rethink their aim to define fix criteria in a statutory order (Rechtsverordnung) – we see continuous improvement of risk models, and fixing them for a long time would exclude Germany from such progress in science. At least there should be a review period of around five years to include improvements.”

Source: Sebastian Schmidt/LinkedIn