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A Blood Test That Screens For Cancer
sciencehabit writes "People usually find out that they have cancer after developing symptoms or through a screening test such as a mammogram—signs that may appear only after the cancer has grown or spread so much that it can't be cured. But what if you could find out from a simple, highly accurate blood test that you had an incipient tumor? By sequencing the abnormal DNA that a tumor releases into a person's bloodstream, researchers are now one step closer to a universal cancer test. Although the technique is now only sensitive enough to detect advanced cancers, that may be a matter of money: As sequencing costs decrease, the developers of the method say the test could eventually pick up early tumors as well."
If it works with early forms of cancer, this is nobel prize material.
The researchers should pitch the project to hypochondriac billionaires.
Tomorrow is another day...
The reason it's so hard to treat and there are so many treatments is that each and every cancer has it's own unique fingerprint in terms of how it works, what it responds to.
It would be nice but I can't see any one test being able to identify all possibilities any time soon. As the article says, it's a step.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I hope they develop better ways of locating the cancer in the body as well, otherwise it will be just like it is now. Dear Sir/Madam your tumor marker has shot up 10x, but we can't find where it's spread, so sorry.
Most interesting cancer treatment research to me:
- Dichloroacetic acid (it's as close to free as possible and has known side effects and is available some places now) but seems to work best in combination with chemo
- anti-CD47 (has the potential to treat numerous cancers, but it's early)
Some screening tests for cancer byproducts already exist, like the PSA test for prostate cancer. Other early-detection tests abound, such as Mammograms and Colonoscopies. While some of the screening tests, such as the Pap Smear, have shown to dramatically reduce cancer deaths, others, such as the PSA and Mammogram have detected a lot of cancers, but done absolutely bupkis to reduce death rates when given to populations not otherwise at high risk. Colonoscopies work, but are extremely expensive vs. the benefit they provide. (As in, it'd be a lot more efficient to spend healthcare dollars elsewhere, and there are other screening tests nearly as effective that are much cheaper.) Apparently they don't do a good job detecting aggressive cancers in those populations early enough to make a difference. With how fast some aggressive cancers work, the tests might have to be administered several times a year (at the cost of countless billions) to make any difference.
In addition, the PSA and Mammogram HAVE caused billions to be spent on procedures with quite severe side effects to further diagnose, and treat, problems that almost certainly would not have killed their "victims." Most Prostate tumors grow slowly enough that you could leave it alone for the rest of your life, and die of something else instead; meanwhile, prostate cancer treatment almost always causes problems with incontinence and impotence; two major quality of life issues. Most "breast cancers" detected by mammograms are Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, another type of cancer that is unlikely to kill you any time soon.
We need to think VERY carefully before rolling out any MORE widespread cancer screening tests, since many of the ones we have now simply don't work.
Your headline is more true than you realize... although you don't realize it.
Something like 2/3rds of the population that we would consider to die of "old age" (generally defined as dying of a condition that predominately kills the elderly, and doing so at around, or greater, than the average lifespan for a developed country), have been discovered, upon death, to have cancer of some sort, but cancer that did NOT contribute to their death. IIRC, the most "popular" are Prostate, Breast, and Brain tumors. Some of those tumors may have been decades old, but slow-growing and non-aggressive enough to simply not be an issue.
Not all cancer is worth detecting if it's almost inevitable that you'll die from simply "wearing out" first.
A good screening test is cheap, minimally invasive, and very, very sensitive. It does not matter if you get false positives, because you will never act on just the result of a screening test alone. You want a test that absolutely does not, however, give you false negatives. That way you reduce the whole population to the sick, and the falso positives. This new population is then re-screened with highly specific, expensive diagnostic tests that determine if the person does or does not have the disease in question.
Ideally you'd be able to screen the whole population with tests that never fail and never give false positives, but in reality this is not affordable, you would end up with waiting lists and budget problems, and people would die waiting for the test. So you pick a test that is sensitive enough to give false positives and you weed them out, being left with only the real positives. It's kind of like the way the TSA works, only backwards (they are so insensitive all they get is false positives, while people with shoe bombs, knives, etc, are allowed to board safely).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No one is "winning" the battle against cancer in general.
The cancer rate is increasing, not decreasing, despite all of the money spent and gone over the past 50 years.
Were killing ourselves by consumption and exposure to unnatural and unnecessary chemicals produced by a highly profitable chemical cartel.
Look, even the mammogram industry (doctors, hospitals and manufacturers) has programed the public with the myth that mammograms saves lives.
After ten years of study, it's been shown to not be true.
More people are diagnosed, but no more people die.
Mammograms are painful and a waste of time and money in many cases, but the almighty dollar is mightier than the truth.
And breast cancer rates keep going up, no matter how many ribbons people wear and money they give.
Likely the only thing that is going to prevent cancer is the death of the organism. With enough basic research it might be possible to find a single or at least a small number, of molecular mechanisms that trigger abnormal cell growth. Then again, it might not. Even if you find them, it doesn't mean you can interrupt or modify them on an organismal level.
So doctors do what they CAN do. And cancer treatments are certainly better than before - less toxic, more effective. But we don't know enough cell and molecular biology to even state that there is a small number of mechanisms that cause cancer. It might be thousands.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!