Why wait until 2023 for a larger study? This is a game changing technology that should be pursued like the COVID vaccine. We should be dumping billions into this across the globe to improve its accuracy and drive costs down.
Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
121–130 of 389 posts
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#122This 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…
Actually you don't want this, and you are describing a nightmare scenario that everyone who studies health policy understands all too well. Mass screening of healthy people will result in extreme iatrogenics and unnecessary psychological damage and stress (which leads to physical effects as well), not to mention overwhelming the medical system. The fact is that many things that could be detected will never result in…
Iatrogenics is when a treatment causes more harm than benefit.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your belief has no representation in medical science, which is mostly evidence based. A lot of data has been collected on this, studies (many) have been conducted and the general consensus is that more testing absent symptoms does not lead to improved patient outcomes. That you want to have some kind of theoretical argument in the face of this evidence might be interesting to you but it isn't to me.
You’re making an unwarranted assumption: that the choice is between early detection with current responses to detected cancers and no early detection at all. Optimizing the response to an early detection will give a result no worse than either of those, since the choices of what to do include doing whatever doctors did in the studies that have poor results as well as doing nothing at all.
No, that is not the assumption. The assumption is that the only way in which such a test will be useful is by applying it absent symptoms to the population en-masse aka screening.
And that - no matter who good the test, and no matter how early - leads to a decrease in positive patient outcomes.
This is established medical science, and it pains me to have to continue to point out the same thing over and over again, but since I started with this response I feel obliged to continue to do so.
The outcome of a cancer treatment is not pre-determined, there are a lot of individual factors at play here that will have a huge effect on the outcome, possibly much larger than the effect of that particular cancer itself.
So en-masse screening leading to an increased number of treatments of pre-symptomatic cancers with those current responses is not a choice, we know that this will lead to a worse outcome across a population.
Early detection does not add anything to that. If you could pick out those individuals for which early detection would make a difference then that would be a gamechanger, and here the ball is currently in the genetics court.
The other part where major change can be made is by finding ways to treat cancers in a way that is non-invasive and does not put the patient further at risk (so no surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy).
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
But: that surgery is not without risk, and if there are no symptoms there is a fair chance that there never will be symptoms. Depending on your age and your genetic make-up you might be more or less at risk. There is such a thing as spontaneous remission and so on. So no, I'm not 'basically giving up', and no you won't die anyway (well, unless you take that in the most abstract way), in particular likely not from can…
I don't see why early detection means early treatment. What if after detected, the illness is monitored instead. If it then gets to a point where the treatment is no longer considered risky for the stage of the illness, then the treatment can proceed. It would also give the person the opportunity to change lifestyle to perhaps prolong the time that the illness will become a problem, or perhaps halt its progress altog…
Sounds to me like the issues with this early detection is more of a regulation and education problem then. That could be fixed.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regularly checking people that are otherwise healthy for cancer will turn up a lot of cancer through false positives or slowly growing ones, will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan. This is one of the reasons why exhaustive cancer screening (which was more costly in the past but could have been done) was not promoted, it had nothing to do wit…
I detest this mindset. It is incredibly counter productive. "Our tests are bad, so lets not test" is not a thought worthy of respect. This states that you know about a problem but want to continue to ignore that problem. Reprehensible. No, we should take the exact opposite approach. Test everyone constantly until such methods become both cheap and powerful. So yeah we all have some cancer load but if the diagnostic o…
> "Our tests are bad, so lets[sic] not test" is not a thought worthy of respect.
Correct. But that's not the issue here.
Current tests can detect benign tumors, and do. People go in for their regular tests, hear "cancer" and of course want to get treatment. But that treatment itself is not idempotent. You want to accept the negative side-effects if the alternative is an aggressive cancer that will end your life soon. But you don't want that if there is no cancer.
As in many fields, it's a matter of trade-offs and risk assessment.
Here's one article detailing some of the issues surrounding overdiagnosis of colorectal cancer:
https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085%2818%293482... (2018)
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have heard your argument on the false positives and unnecessary interventions many times. It is not a good argument. In fact, it makes no sense. If you get a positive with an uncertainty in its accuracy, at the very least, the test is repeated. But even more, you can use the information from the investigation of the reason for the false positive to improve the tests in the first place. If we weren't humans and the un…
Your belief has no representation in medical science, which is mostly evidence based. A lot of data has been collected on this, studies (many) have been conducted and the general consensus is that more testing absent symptoms does not lead to improved patient outcomes. That you want to have some kind of theoretical argument in the face of this evidence might be interesting to you but it isn't to me.
Less information is better?
That would be a bit of a paradox in science. I suppose we might take 2 steps forward and 1 step backward in the short term. As medical science advances, hopefully we can address any shortcomings from the additional early knowledge.
I noticed that pancreatic is on the list. This cancer is almost always fatal because we can't detect it early.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regularly checking people that are otherwise healthy for cancer will turn up a lot of cancer through false positives or slowly growing ones, will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan. This is one of the reasons why exhaustive cancer screening (which was more costly in the past but could have been done) was not promoted, it had nothing to do wit…
Have heard your argument on the false positives and unnecessary interventions many times. It is not a good argument. In fact, it makes no sense. If you get a positive with an uncertainty in its accuracy, at the very least, the test is repeated. But even more, you can use the information from the investigation of the reason for the false positive to improve the tests in the first place. If we weren't humans and the un…
This is a very well known problem for many kinds of screenings, and the solution is not as simple as you claim.
You can't just repeat the test, that is generally not where the problem lies. You'll get a second positive result and still don't know if it's a false positive or not.
And in many cases there aren't other non-invasive test you can perform. If you can't actually determine reliably if some anomaly will cause trouble before removing it, whole population screening will cause unnecessary operations.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#128This 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…
Actually you don't want this, and you are describing a nightmare scenario that everyone who studies health policy understands all too well. Mass screening of healthy people will result in extreme iatrogenics and unnecessary psychological damage and stress (which leads to physical effects as well), not to mention overwhelming the medical system. The fact is that many things that could be detected will never result in…
Utterly wrong. You are conflating current technology like MRIs and CT scans that only detect lumps, to blood tests that detect CANCER.
Yes, if every lump were treated and excised then it would be problematic. But CANCER is different. The only cancer that you might be able to leave alone is prostate because it grows so slowly. Everything else is a risk.
And if we can treat cancer at early stage 1, then maybe people won’t be as afraid of it because it has such a high rate of cure. We don’t know that until we do it.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#129This 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…
Regularly checking people that are otherwise healthy for cancer will turn up a lot of cancer through false positives or slowly growing ones, will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan. This is one of the reasons why exhaustive cancer screening (which was more costly in the past but could have been done) was not promoted, it had nothing to do wit…
> will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan
That's a wild assumption that every cancer will be acted upon in the same manner as a stage IV even in the nascent state...
Given the quality of healthcare and the desire to not be sued for malpractice, it's a fair concern.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually you don't want this, and you are describing a nightmare scenario that everyone who studies health policy understands all too well. Mass screening of healthy people will result in extreme iatrogenics and unnecessary psychological damage and stress (which leads to physical effects as well), not to mention overwhelming the medical system. The fact is that many things that could be detected will never result in…
The argument you’re making has always bothered me because it’s hiding the ball. If finding something that otherwise carries no symptoms is best left untreated, then the fact that you found it should make no difference to the decision. The doctor should say that the best course of action is to do nothing. More information can never be harmful. If you know information is best not acted on in the abstract, then you also…
If thats how you feel, I invite you to slapsgiving this year! Exactly 18:32 on the eve of Thanksgiving.