Further testing may cause anxiety: Your lung scan may suggest that you have lung cancer when no cancer is present (false-positive). A false-positive result leads to more follow-ups, sometimes surgery, before it is found that you don’t have cancer. This can cause increased stress and anxiety during this time.
No screening test is perfect: Your lung scan might also find cases of cancer that are very slow growing and are not expected to cause any problems during your lifetime. This is called overdiagnosis and can lead to treatment that may not benefit you. However, when diagnosed, there is no way for health care professionals to tell if the cancer will cause any problems without doing more tests.
Possible concerns and impacts of screening: Your lung scan will expose you to a very small amount of radiation, but, the chances of you getting cancer through repeated exposure is very low. A low-dose CT scan uses 5 times less radiation than a regular CT scan and is similar to what you would receive from the natural background (radiation from the sky and ground) over six months.
