31–40 of 389 posts
Is it worth taking blood samples now, keeping them in a freezer, and then waiting for the test tech to come so I can get it tested to see disease progression of whatever disease I get when I get older?
This is one of those medical revolutions that I am waiting dearly for. Facilities that are not hospitals(to avoid the risk of occupying medical devices that sick people need) built to _regulary_ check up otherwise healthy people for preventive care. Heck, I have so many alerts defined on my monitoring setup for servers to watch for signals of failure before they get too big. But, my own body is not observed until som…
My experience is people don’t really care much about their bodies beyond the aesthetics. Most treat it like a dumpster and ingest whatever crap feels good and hope for the best. Caring too much makes you some sort of health freak in their eyes, with way too much time on your hands.
https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death#the-number-of-dea...
If you’re tested positive, what’s the probably that you actually have cancer? (The article states 0.5% false positive rate and about 50% true positive rate, but I would need to know the the prevalence of cancer in the population to compute what I am asking for).
A quick Google search suggests the prevalence of pancreatic cancer in the population is 13 per 100,000.
So if you gave this test with a 0.005 false positive rate and 0.5 true positive rate to 100,000 people it would miss diagnose 500 people and only correctly detect 7 cancers.
So given you had a positive test result there would be a 1-(7/500)=98.6% chance you did _not_ have pancreatic cancer.
Doesn't seem very useful in that light...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's already a thing, at least everywhere I've ever lived. You have a primary care doctor, you see them at least once a year, they do a physical exam, maybe some blood work. This test maybe becomes standard of care for everyone annually.
That’s not good enough for cancer because we dont even know how fast or slow it grows. Even if it cancer cells multiplied at the rate of a fetus that would be too fast for an annual physical. Congratulations, death. Ideally something like a wearable computer or nanomachines in your blood stream automatically report anomalies for individualized treatment.
I suspect at least some cancers multiply slower than that, because they work against the rest of the cells.
More technologies like this are coming... Is it worth taking blood samples now, keeping them in a freezer, and then waiting for the test tech to come so I can get it tested to see disease progression of whatever disease I get when I get older?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's already a thing, at least everywhere I've ever lived. You have a primary care doctor, you see them at least once a year, they do a physical exam, maybe some blood work. This test maybe becomes standard of care for everyone annually.
That’s not good enough for cancer because we dont even know how fast or slow it grows. Even if it cancer cells multiplied at the rate of a fetus that would be too fast for an annual physical. Congratulations, death. Ideally something like a wearable computer or nanomachines in your blood stream automatically report anomalies for individualized treatment.
I would also bet on the time-frame between this and the availability of your data on the servers of your health insurance.
If you’re tested positive, what’s the probably that you actually have cancer? (The article states 0.5% false positive rate and about 50% true positive rate, but I would need to know the the prevalence of cancer in the population to compute what I am asking for).
One of the cancers they mention is pancreatic cancer. A quick Google search suggests the prevalence of pancreatic cancer in the population is 13 per 100,000. So if you gave this test with a 0.005 false positive rate and 0.5 true positive rate to 100,000 people it would miss diagnose 500 people and only correctly detect 7 cancers. So given you had a positive test result there would be a 1-(7/500)=98.6% chance you did…
The article says:
"The test, which is also being piloted by NHS England in the autumn, is aimed at people at higher risk of the disease including patients aged 50 or older"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's already a thing, at least everywhere I've ever lived. You have a primary care doctor, you see them at least once a year, they do a physical exam, maybe some blood work. This test maybe becomes standard of care for everyone annually.
This is not true in the Netherlands. You don’t get any tests if there is nothing wrong. Healthcare in this country scares me.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-doctors-responded-to-be...
I suspect doctors in the Netherlands are taught not to over-diagnose. Are they paid through national insurance?
If you’re tested positive, what’s the probably that you actually have cancer? (The article states 0.5% false positive rate and about 50% true positive rate, but I would need to know the the prevalence of cancer in the population to compute what I am asking for).
One of the cancers they mention is pancreatic cancer. A quick Google search suggests the prevalence of pancreatic cancer in the population is 13 per 100,000. So if you gave this test with a 0.005 false positive rate and 0.5 true positive rate to 100,000 people it would miss diagnose 500 people and only correctly detect 7 cancers. So given you had a positive test result there would be a 1-(7/500)=98.6% chance you did…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not true in the Netherlands. You don’t get any tests if there is nothing wrong. Healthcare in this country scares me.
You can ask for a blood test though and ask that they check specific markers. But I agree that huisartsen are too dismissive in general.
I'm not sure if I can even pay someone to make extensive tests here. Never tried. Perhaps one needs to go to the US for that.