Utility of chest X-ray in health checkup program in detecting pleuroparenchymal lesion in a tertiary care hospital

Abstract

Introduction: Asymptomatic individuals may have unnoticed pulmonary lesions (PL) in the form of infective, noninfective, and neoplastic etiology. Earlier studies detected pulmonary pathology in chest radiographs of health checkup patients and this helped in characterizing the PL and changing the course of the disease pattern and prognosis. Aims and Objectives: The aim is to detect the incidence of PL in asymptomatic individuals presenting to preventive health checkup. The objective is to study each chest PA view chest radiographs for any PL. Materials and Methods: Chest PA radiographs of 51,612 individuals are taken as per international standard protocol for health check individuals after prior informed consent. The radiographs are evaluated for PL by senior radiologists. Discussion and Results: The high prevalence of tuberculosis, chronic lung diseases, and occupational PL was noted in the Indian population by various studies. In the present study for PL, a total of 51612 asymptomatic individuals had undergone routine medical health checkup. Out of those screened, 27,508 (53.3%) were males and 24,104 (46.7%) were females, maximum patients were in the 36–55 years age group (46.3%) and minimum being >65 years (4.5%), smokers were 6050 (11.7%), and PL: 1577 (3.1%) which includes parenchymal opacities and pleural based. In addition, cardiomegaly was noted in 1774 (3.4%) of the patients. The maximum PL was seen in 46–55 years age group (59.4%) and a similar trend was observed in cardiomegaly (34.4%) also. Conclusion: The role of routine chest radiographs in health checkup was found to be extremely useful for early detection of the PL and further patients are recommended for higher imaging investigations, biopsy, and bronchoscopy.