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Letters To The Editor

Response to "Commentary: Lung Cancer Screening—Progress or Peril"

^aMassachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment and Department of Radiology, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; ^bDepartment of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence: G. Scott Gazelle, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., MGH-ITA, 101 Merrimac St., 10th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02114, USA. Telephone: 617-726-4445; Fax: 617-726-9414; e-mail: scott{at}mgh-ita.org

Received May 16, 2008; accepted for publication May 18, 2008.

Disclosure: No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

TO THE EDITORS:

We read with interest the article entitled "Commentary: Lung Cancer Screening—Progress or Peril," by James L. Mulshine in the April issue of The Oncologist [1]. Although Dr. Mulshine, for the most part, summarized the major findings of our then-unpublished manuscript [2], we strongly object to his unauthorized use of our data. Neither we nor our coauthors shared our manuscript with Dr. Mulshine, nor did he request or obtain our permission, or that of the journal Radiology, to publish a summary of our methodology or of our results in his Commentary. When asked about this, Dr. Mulshine replied in a letter that he is unable to identify the individual from whom he received our manuscript. This, too, is troubling. In this regard, we appreciate the "Expression of Editorial Concern" you have recently published on The Oncologist's website [3].

Furthermore, though he was generally accurate in describing our study, Dr. Mulshine appears to have misunderstood our approach to calibration and, therefore, overstated the limitations of our modeling, and unfairly diminished the importance of our findings. Our model was calibrated to multiple endpoints from tumor registry data and cohort studies, not solely against chest x-ray–detected cases.

We encourage the readers of The Oncologist to refer to the recently published original article in Radiology [2], where our studies are now fully reported.

	REFERENCES

Top References

 

1. Mulshine JL. Commentary: Lung cancer screening—progress or peril. The Oncologist 2008;13:435–438; doi: 10.1634/theoncologist.2008–0068.[Free Full Text]
2. McMahon PM, Kong CY, Johnson BE et al. Estimating long-term effectiveness of lung cancer screening in the Mayo CT Screening Study. Radiology. 2008 May 5 [E-pub ahead of print]; doi: 10.1148/radiol.2481071446.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
3. Chabner BA. Editorial Expression of Concern. Available at http://theoncologist.alphamedpress.org/cgi/content/full/13/4/435/DC1. Accessed May 10, 2008.

This Article Full Text (PDF) eLetters: Submit a response to this article Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when eLetters are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services E-mail this article link to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Reprints/Permissions Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by McMahon, P. M. Articles by Gazelle, G. S. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by McMahon, P. M. Articles by Gazelle, G. S.