About 10% of lung cancer patients are now younger than 50, and many are diagnosed only after symptoms appear because they do not qualify for routine screening.
Smoking-history rules miss many of these cases because young-onset patients often have never smoked and frequently present with adenocarcinoma driven by targetable biomarkers.
Eric Singhi urged pulmonologists to keep lung cancer in the differential diagnosis for younger adults and to raise awareness that nonsmokers can develop the disease.
Research is shifting toward earlier detection beyond smoking history, including risk-based screening, family-history approaches highlighted by Taiwan data, liquid biopsies and breath tests.