![]() ![]() I had been going through my day as usual, working from home as a medical writer, when I started feeling a bit of pain in my lower right abdomen. I went to the emergency department for a stomach ache and left the hospital with suspicious mass in my right lung. Approximately 15 percent of lung cancer diagnoses were the result of incidental findings. Some cancers are more likely to be found incidentally than are others. About 70,000 of these diagnoses were the results of an incidental finding – the patient took a medical test for one thing, and the test revealed an undiagnosed cancer. In the United States, doctors diagnose cancer in nearly 2 million people each year, according to the American Cancer Society. ![]() Incidentalomas in prostate or colon tests are cancerous about 15 percent of the time. Suspicious findings on breast imaging turn out to be cancerous about 40 percent of the time, for example, and incidental findings in the ovaries, kidneys, and thyroids are cancerous about 25 percent of the time. The percentage of incidental findings that end up being cancerous varies by their location in the body. In those follow-ups, about 10 percent of incidental findings turn out to be a malignant, life-threatening illness. In fact, doctors recommend following up on about half of all suspicious incidental findings. While the majority of incidental findings are benign, some are serious. Many incidentalomas are cysts, for example, or are non-serious problems or just variations of normal human anatomy. Most of the incidental findings are harmless, or benign. Incidental findings happen more often than you might realize – about 45 percent of chest CTs show incidental findings, for example, and incidental findings happen about 22 percent of the time in MRI scans of the brain and spine. The American College of Radiology (ACR) defines an incidental finding as “an incidentally discovered mass or lesion, detected by CT, MRI, or other imaging modality performed for an unrelated reason.” In simpler terms, an incidental finding is when a doctor is looking for one thing but finds another.Īlso known as incidentalomas, incidental findings show up in blood tests and in medical imaging. Out of the blue, I had an incidental finding on a CT scan. Those were the scariest words I had ever heard in my life. Unfortunately, your scan showed something suspicious in your lungs.” “The good news is that your CT of the abdomen looked fine.
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