Lung cancer 'kills 1,500 patients a year who could have been saved by surgery'

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Created on Wednesday, 14 November 2012 00:00

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Lung cancer 'kills 1,500 patients a year who could...

Report finds sufferers are not being offered operations to remove tumours and too few surgeons are skilled at performing them

Caption-Lung cancer is the UK's deadliest cancer. Photograph: Smc Images/Getty Images

About 1,500 lung cancer patients die unnecessarily every year because they are not offered an operation and too few NHS surgeons are skilled in removing tumours, a report warns today.

Most hospitals offer surgery to far fewer patients than the 30% of people with the disease who doctors believe would benefit from treatment, according to an audit of 400,000 lung cancer operations since 1980 by the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery (SCTS).

Some hospitals offer surgery to as few as 12% of such patients; while the highest rate at any hospital in England or Wales is just 23% – still below the 30% deemed eligible for it.

"This surgery can make the difference between life and death," said Richard Page, author of the audit and a consultant thoracic surgeon at the Liverpool heart and chest hospital. "If you get lung cancer it's a pretty lethal disease. Surgery saves lives. [Yet] in some parts of the country too few patients are having this surgery."

Just 18% of patients are offered surgery as an option, according to the SCTS audit. The lowest rates of surgery are in Sussex, East Anglia, Lancashire and Cumbria, South Wales and parts of London, while Merseyside and Cheshire, Yorkshire, Birmingham and Kent provide the most. While the NHS in England and Wales has 70 thoracic surgeons, it needs to increase that to 100 if it is going to make surgery available to more lung cancer patients, Page said. "There's a real problem with patients' access to lung cancer surgery. If more patients had surgery, more would have a cure, as about 50% of those who undergo sugery are free of their disease five years after the operation."

The 70 surgeons find it impossible to attend meetings of the 140 multi-disciplinary teams of medical professionals looking after lung cancer patients, added Page. "From the information we have, one can estimate that an additional 1,500 lives a year could be saved if everybody got adequate access to thoracic surgery to remove the cancers. That's 1,500 unnecessary deaths a year," said Page.

Professor David Taggart, president of the SCTS, said: "If we could get the rate of operations across the country up to the standard of the best performing areas then at least 1,000 additional lives could be saved each year."

Lung cancer is the UK's deadliest cancer and kills 35,000 people a year. The survival rates are particularly low because many patients are diagnosed only once the cancer has spread and surgery is no longer effective.

Those preventable deaths aside, the report found that the number of patients undergoing surgery had risen from 3,000-4,000 a year between 1980 and 2006 to 5,265 last year – a jump of about 60%.

Other progress has seen the rate of patients dying during surgery fall from 3.8% to 2.1%. New operating techniques, such as a form of keyhole surgery that removes diseased tissue through a small hole in the patient's side rather than by opening their rib cage, have also proved less onerous for patients.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "It is vital that cancer patients get treated quickly so they have the best chance of surviving and living well beyond cancer. For many cancer patients early surgery can be critical and the NHS must limit any variation across the service." The government's NHS shakeup will help tackle "unjustified variation" in rates of surgery between hospitals, he added.

Professor Sir Mike Richards, the government's national cancer director for England, said the audit "provides encouraging evidence that surgical treatment for lung cancer is improving in this country – reflecting a welcome increase in the number of specialist lung surgeons". "We can be optimistic that this will in turn lead to better survival rates," he added.

"It is vital that cancer patients get treated quickly so they have the best chance of surviving and living well beyond cancer. We have made early diagnosis central to our cancer outcomes strategy and believe it would contribute significantly to our ambition to save an additional 5,000 lives every year by 2014-15."

Cancer causes more premature deaths among people between 25 and 74 in the UK than any other condition – including heart disease, strokes and Aids – and also kills more people than car crashes, suicide and murder, according to a new analysis of UK mortality data by Cancer Research UK.

However, although more people are being diagnosed with cancer, overall death rates have been falling for 40 years because of better treatments, the charity says.

By Denis Campbell, Health Corespondent

Source: The Guardian UK, 02 November 2011