National lung cancer screening estimates of the United States for the year 2020

Abstract

The uptake and utilization of lung cancer screening services is less than 15% a year. One reason for the low use of these services is the difficulty in determining if a person is eligible for screening services, which requires calculating a smoking pack-year history. A gap in the literature is the lack of integrated smoking history data into a national dataset. We present the first dataset to estimate the number of individuals eligible for lung cancer screening by integrating in smoking history data. We develop a publicly available dataset that allows researchers to understand the estimated population eligible for lung cancer screening at the census tract level. Additionally, our approach allows for the understanding of the eligible population by age, gender, racial/ethnic grouping, and current or former smoking status. The dataset is flexible and allows for filtering of any age, gender, racial/ethnic category in addition to smoking status. This dataset will greatly enhance future programmatic efforts to identify and direct resources to communities that have the highest burden.