Screening for lung cancer in the middle-aged.

A screening programme for lung diseases has been in operation in the German Democratic Republic for more than 3 decades. The programme is based on biennial chest X-rays (70 x 70 mm posterior-anterior) of the population 40 years of age or over. With respect to lung cancer the results show that, for the population under 60 years of age, the adjusted relative risk of dying from lung cancer among subjects who took part in the last screening round compared with subjects who did not but were screened at least once during the preceding 10-year period was 0.93 (95% confidence interval 0.65-1.33).