CHARLOTTE, Mecklenburg County — Research shows that medical technology is advancing so quickly that cancer mortality rates are falling.
With a cancer diagnosis, every day counts and that's why hospitals around the country are improving technology to screen and treat certain types of this disease to boost survival rates.
June 6, 2023, is a day that will forever live with Laura Mulvhill. On that day, she was rushed to the hospital by her husband, fearing the worst. It was a day Mulvhill heard words that she never imagined.
"The ER doctor leaned into my bed and said to me 'You are not having a stroke but you do have lung cancer,'" Mulvihill told WCNC Charlotte's Colin Mayfield.
After being rushed to the hospital with what she thought was a stroke, Mulvihill said her world changed with an unexpected blessing that day.
"By mistake, the technicians who were doing my scans went down a little lower than they should have and picked up a nodule on my left lung," Mulvhill explained.
That God-send Mulvihill experienced is now embodied in a new program at Novant Health Cancer Institute called the comprehensive lung nodule program.
It provides scans that help detect and flag abnormal nodules so that a team of experts can thoroughly follow up and get on treatment as quickly as possible.
"About 25% or 26% are caught at an early stage which means the survival rate at five years is about 60%," director of the program Juleidy Turnipseed said.
With lung cancer as the leading cause of cancer deaths among men and women, Turnipseed, who manages the program, said patients considered high risk or with family history are annually screened with a low-dose CT scan.
Novant’s data shows a 20% decrease in mortality with consecutive scans.
Accessibility to this type of technology is top of mind at Novant Health. They want to make these low-dose CT Scans more mainstream and allow people from any community, rural or otherwise, the opportunity for a life-saving scan.
"We're trying to understand where is the small population that is being affected and do they have a mortality rate because of not being screen or because catching it at the later stages," Turnipseed said.
Technology that is truly saving lives and leading to victories over a deadly disease.
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Contact Colin Mayfield at cmayfield@wcnc.com or follow him on Facebook, X and Instagram.