Proposing the use of hyponatremia as a marker to help identify high risk individuals for lung cancer.

Overview

The use of computerized tomography (CT) scans has been recently brought into attention to help screen high risk individuals for lung cancer. Even though they are highly sensitive, their cost seems to be the main hindrance. Our hypothesis is to see if other factors could help identify a subset amongst the high risk individuals. Our focus specifically is on hyponatremia. It is well known that patients with lung cancer can have associated hyponatremia and multiple mechanisms have been put forward. Our hypothesis is that the degree of hyponatremia can be correlated with size or aggressiveness of the tumor and if true, then screening high risk individuals with hyponatremia can yield more patients with possible lung cancer. This, therefore, may help decrease the associated costs as compared to imaging/screening everyone with a CT scan for lung cancer and have a major impact at the public health level.