Nobody wants to get lung cancer. Nobody who has it looks forward to the radical treatment such a diagnosis usually demands. But a recent research study lifted a bit of the dark cloud hovering over these patients. It found a significant decrease--20%--in deaths among lung cancer patients screened annually for three years with a certain type of CT scan compared with conventional chest X-rays.

This being lung cancer, and this being an evolving technology, caveats are in order: More than 90% of positive screening tests using both techniques were false positives, and the study did not assess the costs of false positive tests.