Screening for Lung Cancer

Results: Thirty-three studies formed the evidence base for this review; 13 RCTs were used to answer the question regarding the benefits of screening for lung cancer and 30 studies provided data to answer the question about harms of screening or invasive follow-up testing. [...] In addition, the studies included in the 2013 lung cancer screening reviews by the Cochrane group25 and the USPSTF,26 as well as the studies identified through hand-searching systematic review reference lists, were added to the pool of citations available for relevance testing against the inclusion criteria for this review. [...] Data Abstraction For each study used to answer the key questions, review team members extracted data about the population, the study design, the intervention, the analysis and the results for outcomes of interest. [...] Assessing Strength or Quality of the Evidence The strength of the evidence was determined based on the GRADE system of rating the quality of evidence using GRADEPro software.30, 31 This system of assessing evidence is widely used and is endorsed by over 40 major organizations including the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research [...] Data Analysis To perform meta-analyses for the critical and important benefits of lung cancer screening (lung cancer mortality, all-cause mortality and stage distribution), we utilized the number of events, proportion or percentage data from included RCTs to generate the summary measures of effect in the form of risk ratios (RR) using the DerSimonian and Laird random effects model with inverse var