Theranos?
This test probably needs a lot more blood than a single drop.
Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
141–150 of 389 posts
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#142If one wanted to invest in the people doing this kind of work, what would you buy? Grail isn't public and I'm not a venture capitalist.
There are multiple academic startup companies now trying to do cfDNA tests. They have all acquired patents from a paper or two. I would be wary about many of the early stage ones as they are not truly proven or have demonstrated scale.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#143This 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…
Cause things break down all the time. And everything can look like early signs of trouble. There are lot useless docs and surgeons waiting to perform unnecessary expensive procedures much like building contractors. Oh that pipe is leaking let's just replace this entire load bearing wall etc cause we have this new cool machine that can. Second opinions are over rated cause the majority don't care. There is an endless…
This sounds like a regulation and education problem to me.
early detection doesn't have to mean treatment, it could just be monitoring and change of lifestyle.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#144Earlier 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…
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 wo…
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Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#145Earlier 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 you take dumb patients as the problem, you are willing to hurt people with good decision making ability (who would heed their good doctor’s advice to leave the possible ailment untreated) so you can protect people with bad decision making.
It seems like we've made this decision with covid-19. Dr. Fauci has been canonized, but we know that he's been intentional misleading the public through misinformation (starting from telling us that masks aren't effective in order to preserve the supply for medical providers, and later mis-stating herd immunity numbers to manipulate people into getting the behavior he wanted).
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#146This 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…
The reason this is not happening isn't a technical one. It's that people with a medical background will tell you this isn't a healthy utopia, it's a nightmare.
Medical tests are complicated. They often have significant false positive and false negative rates. Testing people at scale increases the number of people with wrong test results and can cause harm if you start treating people based on wrong test results. The more healthy people you test the more false positives you get.
The goal of evidence based medicine is to use tests when they can help. It's not to test as many people as possible. This is reasonable. You want to improve patient's lives. Whether or not a test is improving patient's lives is often not easy to answer and has to consider many things.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wo…
You say "utterly wrong" and yet you clearly have no idea what you're talking about and have never even approached the field of health policy. Screening has to PROVE that it makes people live longer or better, just like any other intervention. It is not the case that screening is automatically good, otherwise we would be giving 20 year olds colonoscopies. Just because you find something, doesn't mean you've helped the…
We don’t give colonoscopies to 20 years olds because it’s an expensive, invasive test with a low rate of cancer. We don’t give mammograms to under 40 year olds these days because the same and it’s notoriously inaccurate.
We give blood glucose level tests and cholesterol tests to everyone every year at the physical because they are cheap and easy to administer. Even though the effects of both may take decades to have any effect and have no correlation to ultimate death. It’s about trade off of cost and convenience.
If you detect pancreatic or colon cancer in a 20 year old patient via $1 blood test, that is immediately actionable. Cancer is ALWAYS actionable unless you’re talking about prostrate which grows slowly. But even in a 20 year old, you would want to treat that but maybe not a 70 year old.
And we’ve never had the ability to detect stage 1 cancer of the deadliest types of cancer. Imagine the new treatments that might save lives if we could.
Honestly, the number of people here who think they know better and citing unrelated research is bordering on anti-maskers parroting the surgeon general saying masks don’t work when they do.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer. So we don’t know what we can do yet. Right now by the time we detect it, we are dead. An entire generation of early detection might create new methods to treat it. We don’t know what we don’t know.
> There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer The third paragraph of the article says otherwise. Do you have some knowledge about this test not working?
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Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#149Earlier 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.
May be I have been living in a bubble. I remember doing a “annual check up” in the US about 5 years ago, and that was super basic - blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol levels etc. they didn’t even do a detailed enough bloodwork to test for allergies. Definitely not looking for any disease vectors. Now, I live in DK, and my visit to the GP would always go with my hard attempts to convince my GP that something is really…
This approach actually works really well for conserving healthcare dollars. If a doctor feels like nothing is wrong, 99% of the time they’ll be right. Sucks to be that 1% where you die of a cancer that would have been caught, but that’s the trade off.
The marginal return of each dollars spent on screening goes down quickly. At a population level you can’t justify it, but at a personal level you can.
Re: Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out
#150> It correctly identified when cancer was present in 51.5% of cases, across all stages of the disease, and wrongly detected cancer in only 0.5% of cases.
While I think this is a great step forward, How can this be described as highly accurate when it missed identifying cancer in 48.5% of the people?