The ACCP has issued new lung cancer guidelines on screening, preventing and coping with lung cancer.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S., killing over 150,000 Americans each year.

Experts at the ACCP say nodules are often found during screening but determining whether they are cancerous requires additional invasive and extensive testing.

This they say may cause the patient unnecessary risk, both physically and psychologically and often these abnormalities turn out to be harmless scar tissue.

Experts say lung biopsy procedures carry a range of risks, including infection and bleeding, and the CT scan itself exposes patients to potentially harmful radiation; also false positive results from the CT scan can cause patients unnecessary worry.

The ACCP guidelines also say people at risk for lung cancer are not advised to take beta-carotene supplements, vitamin E supplements, retinoids (vitamin A), N-acetylcysteine, selenium, or aspirin for lung cancer prevention.

The ACCP has issued guidelines for the first time on the use of complementary therapies for lung cancer patients which support the use of massage for lung cancer patients experiencing anxiety, mood disturbances, or chronic pain.

They also recommend acupuncture for lung cancer patients experiencing nausea, vomiting, pain, or fatigue from their lung cancer treatment, and for those unable to quit smoking through other methods.

The ACCP says lung cancer patients should tell their doctors about any complementary therapies they use and avoid treatments that claim to replace conventional medical care.

Dr. Gene Colice of the Washington Hospital Center in Washington DC, U.S., who helped write the ACCP guidelines says a large study involving more than 50,000 participants should eventually give the medical community a good idea of whether CT scans can, in fact, help doctors find and treat cancer more effectively.

The guidelines, which also include technical details for doctors treating lung cancer, are published in a special edition of the journal Chest.

Besides rewriting the ophthalmology textbooks on retinal growth, the discovery should greatly enhance research into eye disease, the experts say.

"There are currently more than 100 retinal eye diseases in human populations, and problems with rhodopsin trafficking or outer segment development are thought to play a role in many of these potentially blinding conditions," Dr. Sung notes. "In fact, we got interested in this type of research because we knew that breakdowns in rhodopsin trafficking were crucial to a common eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa."

Retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder affecting about 100,000 Americans, is caused by the gradual death of rods and cones, triggering a progressive loss of vision.

Until now, however, little was known about rod cell regeneration, especially when it came to replacing rhodopsin-bearing discs.

"Our discovery now lays the groundwork for people to study just how many of these retinal diseases occur," Dr. Sung says. "That's why it's so important from a clinical point of view."

Yu Zhao, M.S., also of Weill Cornell, is the third author on this study.

The study was funded by the Foundation Fighting Blindness, Research to Prevent Blindness, The Irma T. Hirsch Trust, The Ruth and Milton Steinbach Fund, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

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