600,000 people in Yorkshire will be eligible for life-saving lung health checks

600,000 people in Yorkshire could be offered a life-saving lung health check over the next five years, following the success of a pioneering lung screening trial in Leeds.

Leeds Lung Health Check, funded by Yorkshire Cancer Research and delivered in partnership with Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust and the University of Leeds, helped pave the way for a national lung screening programme, set to be fully rolled out by the Government by 2030.

An anticipated £270 million will be spent delivering nearly a million scans every year across England, with the aim of saving hundreds of lives, including in Yorkshire where lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death.

Yorkshire Cancer Research hosted a celebration event bringing together key partners, employees, volunteers and supporters to celebrate the successes of the trial which, as one of the largest lung screening trials in the UK, has screened over 8,800 people and detected 400 cancers since 2018.

Of the lung cancers detected, 80% were found at an early stage. The number rose to 88% in the trial’s second round of screening, meaning hundreds of lives in Yorkshire have potentially been saved.

Lung screening is vital as cancer can be found at the earliest opportunity when there are often more treatment options available. When detected at stage one, 68% of people with lung cancer live beyond five years, compared to 9% of those diagnosed at stage four.

David Sutcliffe, 74, was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer in 2022 after visiting the Leeds Lung Health Check. He received surgery to remove the tumour, needing no further treatment.

The Leeds Lung Health Check invited people in Leeds for a chest scan in a mobile screening unit, which visited convenient community locations like supermarket car parks to make it easier for people to attend. Targeted mobile lung checks like this have since been introduced to areas in Yorkshire with a high lung cancer mortality rate, such as Hull and parts of South Yorkshire.

Professor Mat Callister, Lead Consultant in Respiratory Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Honorary Professor at the University of Leeds, said:

“The trial provided key data and evidence to demonstrate to the government that lung screening is feasible in the UK and offers value for money for the NHS. We were able to demonstrate that over half of all people who are invited to a lung health check will accept the invitation and turn up. That critical data was unique to this clinical trial and provided the government with what it needed to understand how to make this work on a national scale.

“We’re very grateful for the thousands of people in Leeds who agreed to be part of the trial. They played a crucial role in paving the way for the national programme, which will now be offered to hundreds of thousands more people in the region.”

Yorkshire Cancer Research has funded innovative research and cancer services alongside the Leeds Lung Health Check to find new ways to improve rates of early diagnosis and prevent cancer in Yorkshire, so that more lives can be saved.

The Yorkshire Kidney Screening Trial, funded by the charity and led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, was an additional piece of innovative research carried out alongside the Leeds Lung Health Check. It demonstrated that combining lung and kidney screening could help identify undiagnosed cases of kidney cancer.

More than nine in ten people accepted the additional scan when attending their lung health check. Of the kidney cancers identified, 90% were found to be Stage One that may have otherwise remained undetected due to symptoms of kidney cancers often not appearing until the later stages.

An integrated stop smoking service was also offered alongside the lung health check, with over 2,200 people receiving stop smoking support alongside their scan.

The Yorkshire Stop Smoking Study, funded by Yorkshire Cancer Research and led by researchers at the University of Nottingham and the University of Leeds, aims to show that combining lung health checks with stop-smoking intervention is an effective way of helping people to stop smoking. So far, over 900 people taking part in the study have reported successfully quitting.

Dr Kathryn Scott, Chief Executive at Yorkshire Cancer Research, said:

“Unfortunately, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in Yorkshire, with nearly 3,000 people in the region dying from the disease every year. The national roll out of this innovative programme will help extend the early diagnosis of lung cancer across even more of Yorkshire and could offer the opportunity to save many more lives through the detection of other cancers and the provision of stop smoking support.

"By first targeting higher risk and more deprived communities, the new lung screening programme will be significant in reducing health inequalities within the region. The Leeds Lung Health Check is just one example of Yorkshire Cancer Research funding work that will save lives across the region, while providing a blueprint for what a successful screening programme can look like on a national and global level.”