Lung cancer kills around 125,000 Americans every year, more than any other cancer, and a Nashville-based group is working to change that by pushing people toward earlier screening. The group, tied to Lipscomb University, is planning a community event next month in Nashville that will include planting 1,000 flags in Centennial Park in solidarity with lung cancer patients, survivors, and people who have died from the disease.
Bryson Lovern, president of Lipscomb University's chapter of the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative, said lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the country, with around 125,000 people dying per year, according to News Channel 5 Nashville. That figure tracks with national data: the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force identifies lung cancer as the second most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer death in the United States.
Lovern said lung cancer screening receives little public attention, even though the disease is often diagnosed only after it has spread, making treatment more difficult. Findings are often incidental and discovered at a late stage, he said. The Lipscomb chapter of the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative aims to get people screened at stage one, when outcomes are generally far better.
Tennessee's Numbers Tell a Harder Story
The stakes are especially high in Tennessee. The state's lung cancer incidence rate stands at 66.9 new cases per 100,000 people, well above the national rate of 52.8, according to the American Lung Association. Only 26.3% of lung cancer cases in Tennessee are caught at an early stage, compared with 28.1% nationally, and the state's five-year survival rate of 25.9% trails the national rate of 29.7%.
Screening itself remains underused in Tennessee, with just 14.8% of people at high risk getting screened, versus a national rate the American Lung Association put at 18.2%. That gap matters because most lung cancer cases are still diagnosed after the disease has spread, when treatment options are less likely to be curative and survival drops, the organization notes. Annual low-dose CT screening among high-risk people can reduce the lung cancer death rate by up to 20% by catching disease earlier, per the same organization.
Who Qualifies, and Why Screening Rates Lag
The Task Force recommends annual low-dose CT screening for adults ages 50 to 80 who have a 20 pack-year smoking history and currently smoke or quit within the past 15 years. That guidance reflects an expansion from an earlier standard: the age range used to start at 55, and the smoking-history threshold used to be 30 pack-years before both were lowered. Screening is meant to stop once someone has gone 15 years without smoking or develops a health problem that substantially limits life expectancy or the ability to undergo curative lung surgery, and the Task Force concludes with moderate certainty that annual screening offers a moderate net benefit for those at high risk.
Nationally, screening uptake has been climbing but still lags far behind other cancer screenings. Uptake rose from about 12.8% in 2019 to 24.5% in 2024, according to Healio, though figures for 2022 differ slightly depending on the source: Healio put that year's rate at 18.1%, while the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative reported 18.2%. Either way, Healio notes that 2022 lung cancer screening uptake trailed far behind breast cancer screening at 76.6% and colorectal cancer screening at 61.4%.
Access also varies sharply by insurance status and whether someone has a regular doctor. Healio reported that 2022 screening uptake was highest among people with Medicare, at 26.3%, and lowest among the uninsured, at just 3.7%. Adults with a usual source of care were screened at nearly four times the rate of those without one, 19.7% versus 5.1%, the outlet's analysis found. Separate research has also pointed to geographic inequities in access to low-dose CT screening across Tennessee tied to rurality and Appalachian status, though that work has not been independently verified in full.
Vanderbilt's Screening Program and a Push for Permanent Guidelines
Locally, Vanderbilt's Lung Cancer Screening Program offers yearly CT scans to patients considered high risk because of age or smoking history, according to Vanderbilt Health. The program has performed more than 3,000 lung screening tests since 2013, per Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Advances in technology, surgical intervention, and immunotherapeutics now give patients a wider range of treatment options than in years past, Lovern said, but he argued that medical progress should not lessen the urgency behind long-term legislative action to permanently broaden screening guidelines.
The American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative, the national organization behind the Lipscomb chapter, says screening can find disease earlier, when treatment has the best chance to work. The group says more than 220 high school and college chapters nationwide now help neighbors understand their screening options, part of a broader effort to close the gap between how many people qualify for screening and how many actually get it.
Nashville's community event next month will mark that effort locally, with the 1,000 flags in Centennial Park intended as a visible tribute to patients, survivors, and those who have died from lung cancer. A final date for the gathering was still being determined as of the report.
