New Blood Test Could Spot Lung Cancer Earlier

Lung cancer takes a heavy toll worldwide. Many cases slip through because current screening methods miss high-risk people. Scientists are working on smarter tools to catch the disease before it spreads. Their goal is to find a simple blood test that tells us who needs attention first.

To build this tool, researchers used two major Danish populations. The Copenhagen General Population Study provided training data with 689 confirmed cases and nearly 2,000 healthy controls. The larger Copenhagen City Heart Study offered thousands of participants for final testing. These groups helped shape a six-year risk prediction model built around blood biomarkers.

The team compared their new model, CPH-Lung, with an established system called PLCOm2012. The results were clear. CPH-Lung performed better across the board. Its ability to detect all six-year lung cancers reached 78.3 percent, beating the older system's 72.0 percent mark. Women and younger adults benefited most from this improvement.

One standout difference appeared when looking at sensitivity. For women specifically, the new test caught 57.6 percent of cases, while the standard approach only found 39.2 percent. Men saw a jump from 61.4 percent up to 54.7 percent. On average, patients flagged by the new test were diagnosed at 68.2 years old, which is younger than the 76.5 years seen with the older method.