Lung cancer mortality and the availability of chest computerized tomography: a longitudinal nationwide study.

Lung-cancer screening with chest computerized tomography (CT) is not easy to introduce in low-medium resource countries due to cost issues. We investigated whether the increasing availability of chest CT exams in Brazil, in spite of no lung-cancer screening protocol, was associated with lung-cancer death rate along 10-year follow-up. We performed regressions to estimate the rate ratio between chest CT exams and lung-cancer deaths per 10(5)inhabitants. We stratified data per municipality. Regressions were adjusted for physicians and hospital beds per 10(5)inhabitants and per capita gross domestic product. Increasing availability of chest CT exams predicted decreasing lung-cancer death rate.