UNM Hospital opens lung cancer screening clinic

Physicians at the University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center are breathing a sigh of relief after the opening of new comprehensive lung cancer screening clinic, which addressed a systemic gap in health care in the state.

Dr. Akshu Balwan said the clinic, which started seeing patients last month, hopefully will lead to a quicker diagnosis of lung cancer, which greatly improves the chances of someone surviving the disease. He said that New Mexico has historically had issues with timely treating people who have some sort of abnormality in their lungs.

Lung cancer is among the deadliest forms of cancer, Balwan said, and a timely diagnosis can greatly affect a person’s outcome.

About 90% of patients diagnosed with stage 1 lung cancer survive for five years or more with treatment. But when the cancer spreads outside the lungs, the five-year survival rate drops to less than 10%.

“One of the reasons why we’re opening this clinic ... is so we can eliminate the wait time for patients,” he said.

Balwan said New Mexico is in need of lung cancer specialists.

“There’s a need for more specialists and there’s a need for cross-institutional collaboration to improve the state of lung cancer care in the state itself,” he said.

The new clinic brings together pulmonologists, radiologists, oncologists and other health care professionals to treat patients as a team, said Michele Sequeira, a hospital spokeswoman.

“There’s a lot of specialists that are involved in patient care,” Balwan said. “To have a successful screening program, UNM has to get them all together in one place so that we can offer the best possible next step to patients who are found to have lung cancer.”

Nearly 1,000 people are diagnosed with lung cancer in New Mexico each year and about 560 of those will die from it, according to the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program.

Only about 2% of eligible New Mexicans get screened for lung cancer, according to UNM Hospital.

Balwan said that lung cancer screening has traditionally only been sporadically offered in New Mexico.

He said most of the clinic’s original patients already have had a computed tomography, or CT, scan that has revealed some sort of anomaly in their lungs. The team at UNM then plan the next course of action, such as a biopsy to determine if it is cancerous.

The biggest indicator for determining someone’s risk of getting lung cancer is a history of smoking, Balwan said.

“If you are a current or former smoker who smoked for 25 years or a significant part of your life, please discuss with your health care provider about whether you are eligible for lung cancer screening,” Balwan said.

Balwan said the hospital plans to continue making the new clinic available to more and more patients.