HJAR Nov/Dec 2022

50 NOV / DEC 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS DIALOGUE COLUMN ONCOLOGY HEALTHCARE moves fast . For us, emerging technologies and ground-breaking advance- ments are an everyday occurrence. And yet, we as a medical community are still losing patients to lung cancer, the deadliest cancer to date, at a shockingly high rate — nation- ally and even more so in Arkansas. At stage 1, lung cancer can have a 70% or greater sur- vivability rate, but the window of detecting it at that early stage is very narrow. What hap- pens once symptoms appear? Survivability rates plummet. Working together, we can help 255,000 at-riskArkansans get low-dose lung screenings to catch this killer before it’s gone too far. The Race to Reach Patients at Risk for Lung Cancer OUT OF BREATH: The Arkansas lung cancer crisis The CDC ranks Arkansas among the top five states for lung cancer deaths (along with Kentucky, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Oklahoma), and we shouldn’t be surprised. Smoking is an overwhelming risk factor — with an established link of nearly 95% for small cell lung cancer and around 85% for non-small cell lung cancers — and cigarette smoking is still going strong in Arkansas, despite declining usage across the nation. Add to that ongoing exposure to pesticides, inherent in our agro-intensive state, plus a 15% genetic predisposition 1 , and we’ve got a recipe here for lung cancer. As a primarily rural state, some patients in the past have faced an oncology care desert. That is one of the reasons CARTI has placed such a high priority on patient access in re- cent years, building multiple cancer centers (along with many clinics) across the state — the largest comprehensive cancer network in Arkansas. Today, most Arkansans, if not all, are within 30 to 50 miles of a CARTI facility where low-dose lung screenings are available. Low-dose CT scans for qualified patients CARTI’s super premium low-dose CT scanner delivers a minimal dose of radia- tion, equivalent to the exposure fromone trip in an airplane (a risk that is more theoretical