OLIVE: Improving the early detection of lung cancer in never-smokers
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Improving the early detection of lung cancer in never-smokers
IRAS ID
330782
Contact name
Neal Navani
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
UCLH/UCL Joint Research Office
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 5 days
Research summary
Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide and in the United Kingdom (UK). In 2020, 51,983 adults in the UK were diagnosed with it and 36,518 died from it. Many people think lung cancer is due to smoking. However, at least one in ten people with lung cancer have never smoked. ‘Never-smokers’ are people who have smoked less than 100 tobacco cigarettes in their life. In fact, lung cancer in never-smokers (LCINS) is the seventh most common cause of cancer-related death.
In the UK, people who have smoked are invited for screening with scans. However, we do not have any methods to detect LCINS early in never-smokers. We also do not understand LCINS very well. If we change this, we can save more lives and improve the lives of people living with lung cancer.
My aim is to improve our ability to detect LCINS earlier.I will not collect any new information from patients or make any changes to their care. Instead, I will mainly use information normally collected in health records, but with personal identifiers removed (pseudo-anonymised). This involves:
- Summarising previous research studies to describe the risk factors for LCINS.
- Looking at cancer health records to see if factors like gender and ethnicity are related to LCINS.
- Looking at electronic health records from general practices to calculate someone’s risk of LCINS in the next five years
- Looking at the same records to predict someone’s risk of having LCINS at the time they are seeing their doctor. This will be based on things like their symptoms and blood tests.In the future, I want to develop and test ways to use the tools from my research to detect LCINS earlier.
Patients with LCINS have been involved throughout with group and one-to-one meetings.
REC name
London - Bloomsbury Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/LO/0855
Date of REC Opinion
13 Oct 2023
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion