American College of Chest Physicians publishes new lung cancer screening guidelines

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the highly anticipated guidelines on screening for lung cancer by the American College of Chest Physicians® (CHEST) were published online on the journal CHEST® website. This comes after the guideline panelists provided a peek at the recommendations during the CHEST annual meeting in October in Toronto. Doctor Evidence (DRE), a global health technology and consulting company, was selected to perform the systematic review of evidence in support of this guideline, through the GROWTH program.

Lung cancer accounts for more deaths than breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers combined. Research on lung cancer screening with low-dose CT scanning of high-risk patients reflects an encouraging benefit-to-harms ratio. Yet, even among the high-risk patients, only a small percentage will benefit, while all patients will be exposed to potential harms. Appropriate selection is difficult and compounded by patient factors from age to current and past tobacco use and institutional factors such as the quality of the imaging devices and radiologists' readings. Therefore, it has been complicated for physicians and patients to make informed decisions about whether individuals would benefit from lung cancer screening.

These new guidelines include practical remarks addressing implementation and shared decision-making challenges. The comprehensive set of evidence-based recommendations provide guidance supported by evidence, and the inclusion of consensus-based statements allow the CHEST authors to also provide suggestions in areas where uncertainty remains.

To assess the level and quality of evidence, CHEST contracted with Doctor Evidence for the literature review commencing with a systematic and comprehensive search of the published clinical trials, analyses, and existing reviews. Complying with the highest standards of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine), Doctor Evidence's medical librarians and methodologists, along with the guideline panelists, screened the studies against the pre-specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. Relevant data was extracted into the DOC Data^TM platform and extensive quality reviews were performed on the digitized studies before the database underwent auditing. Doctor Evidence's unique approach to ontology management permits binding of like terms and synonyms, while preserving the underlying author-reported definitions. DOC Data's^TM sophisticated R-based analytic tools were used by the CHEST methodologist to meta-analyze the data. Additional literature monitoring was performed during the review phase employing the Doctor Evidence DOC Search^TM platform.

The resulting evidence-based guideline recommendations can be updated as deemed necessary by CHEST, since Doctor Evidence can monitor the literature and keep the evidence base up to date. Robert Battista, CEO of Doctor Evidence, stated, "These lung cancer screening guidelines are an important contribution to the field and Doctor Evidence is pleased to have played an important role in this effort."

ABOUT DOCTOR EVIDENCE:
Doctor Evidence (DRE) is a health technology and consulting company utilizing state-of-the-art solutions that identify, synthesize, and analyze complex clinical research data into fit-to-purpose actionable knowledge. Resulting high quality evidence reviews provide guideline developers, academic researchers, medical providers, manufacturers, payers, and patients with evidence-based information to make timely and educated decisions on recommended treatment protocols, outcomes research, health economics, risk management, market access, reimbursement, value determinations, and burden of illness cost models. These methodologically rigorous reviews and analyses fully comply with accepted international standards to address the needs of patients, providers, and scientists worldwide. To learn more about Doctor Evidence, visit GROWTHevidence.com and drevidence.com.

SOURCE Doctor Evidence

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