Carl Heneghan

Please give me the absolute numbers.

And that paper is published over 10 years ago.

The situation has got worse, not better.

But what I did is try to say, OK, if you take 2,000 people in this trial, 1,000 get lung cancer screening and 1,000 don't.

What does that look like?

Well, in the 1,000 people who were screened, 132 people died.

And in the 1,000 people who weren't screened, 130 people died.

So the first thing you can see is there's no difference in terms of all-cause mortality between the two groups.

Then you can break that down.

In the people who were screened out of that 132, 24 died of lung cancer and 108 died of something else.

If you look in the non-screen group, 32 people died of lung cancer and 98 died of something else.

So what you've got is these two opposing issues.

The 0.76 refers to the 24 lung cancers in the screen group compared to the 32 in the non-screen group.

But you get this increase in the deaths from other causes.

And that increase is about 10% more.

And in some areas, like death from endocrine causes, we're doubled in the screening group.

Not only that, then you can start to think about the other issues.

Within that 1,000 people, what else is going on?

So, for instance, of the 1,000 people, 71 will have a positive screening test, 31 of them will be lung cancer, and 40 will be false positive.

So you've created that anxiety.