Lung Nodule Clinic

Baptist Health Lexington: Lung Nodule Clinic

Pulmonologist Patton Thompson, MD, talks about the importance of the hospital’s Lung Nodule Clinic in helping patients discover lung cancer in its early, more treatable, stages.

Lung Nodule Clinic Health Talks Transcript

Patton Thompson, MD, Pulmonary Medicine
Lung cancer’s not the most common cancer in the United States, but lung cancer kills more patients than breast, colon or prostate cancer combined. There’s been a huge, concerted effort to try to catch lung cancer early. If you do an annual low-radiation dose CT scan, they improve the survival of lung cancer by 20 percent. So, in order to address the need in Kentucky, we created a Lung Nodule Clinic. Patients frequently come to the Emergency Department, for example, for other reasons and have a CT scan performed for various reasons, and many times we find small nodules or lung masses that need urgent follow-up that don’t necessarily require admission to the hospital, so the lung nodule clinic is time set aside each week for these patients to get in in an expedited fashion and have an appropriate work-up.
James & Leslie Bush, Harlan, Kentucky
I had no signs or symptoms of the cancer until I got this diagnosis, and it’s pretty devastating. The healthcare team here at Baptist is fantastic. We couldn’t ask for a better set of doctors that I’ve had. The whole team’s been fantastic.

Dr. Thompson
If lung cancer is caught early, the chances of survival are dramatically improved. So, screening in critically important, because we hope to catch these patients at stage one when they can really be cured and have a long-term survival.