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A Cheap and Easy Blood Test Could Catch Cancer Early (technologyreview.com)
A simple-to-take test that tells if you have a tumor lurking, and even where it is in your body, is a lot closer to reality -- and may cost only $500. From a report: The new test, developed at Johns Hopkins University, looks for signs of eight common types of cancer. It requires only a blood sample and may prove inexpensive enough for doctors to give during a routine physical. "The idea is this test would make its way into the public and we could set up screening centers," says Nickolas Papadopoulos, one of the Johns Hopkins researchers behind the test. "That's why it has to be cheap and noninvasive." Although the test isn't commercially available yet, it will be used to screen 50,000 retirement-age women with no history of cancer as part of a $50 million, five-year study with the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, a spokesperson with the insurer said. The test, detailed today in the journal Science, could be a major advance for "liquid biopsy" technology, which aims to detect cancer in the blood before a person feels sick or notices a lump. That's useful because early-stage cancer that hasn't spread can often be cured.
$500 a pop to be able to blacklist before the they any Cancer care is cheap to all health planes
In addition, they say nothing about benign positives. That is worrisome.
Cancer is described by many as a failure of the immune system. They say that we develop cancerous cells constantly that the body detects and eliminates. We only get problematic cancer when the immune system fails to detect and eliminate these cells.
An early detection test with very high sensitivity may start to detect this daily battle. These positives would not be "false" but neither would they necessarily indicate that the body is losing the battle. We do not have good data at this time on how many small cancers the body successfully eliminates before they become a problem that we can detect with traditional methods.
The real danger here is that there is no economic incentive for those in the cancer industry to do anything other than diagnose and treat it, ironically, with treatments that often cause further cancers. They are unlikely to do the research to tease out whether a positive indicates out-of-control cancer.
Currently insurance is guaranteed-issue in the US, and treating early-stage cancers is easier/cheaper than catching them late. So yeah, this will save money, and not by blacklisting.
Also, $500 is cheaper than tests for cancer like scopes and CAT scans.
Talking to a researcher at Tufts, he pointed out that we have plenty of new diagnostics that can't be used because insurance won't cover them. The insurance companies are afraid that the diagnostic will uncover a condition that has to be treated, which would cost more than letting the condition go until it becomes untreatable and the patient dies quickly.
So even though this test might suggest an earlier treatment that is cheaper, you still have to compare the actuarial value of not doing the test and letting the cancers go until they are discovered by some other method.
We need some sort of game-theory change in how insurance companies operate, so that their goal is better health and not lower costs.
Perhaps penalizing the company for deaths under a certain age (to encourage the company to value life over costs), or something similar.
Simply mandating the test and other legislative directives won't work, because the companies still have the incentive to reduce costs - they will always be pulling in the opposite direction.
We need a way to get the insurance companies to pull in the same direction as their customers, so that they both have the same goals.
That being, better health.
Whether it proves to be economical (or even ethical) depends greatly on the level of false positives, beyond the false positives, the number of results that show cancer but the particular cancer in question is something that would have no real health consequences, how harmful the treatments for the cancers are, and how expensive the treatments for the cancers are. Witness the evolution of thinking surrounding prostate cancer detection and treatment... a lot of lessons were learned there.
That said, I think there are likely to be huge benefits from taking as many measurements as we can, starting as soon as we can, without acting on them and before in many cases we even know how to act on them. To me it's appalling that we aren't all wearing some bracelet that logs everything it can for future scientific study or potential diagnostic utility... both because part of the reason we don't is you can't trust anyone not to misuse or lose custody of data these days, and the other part of the reason is we'd rather spend our money on a few more pixels per inch or a screen that bends around the side of our cell phones.
Both of those reasons disgust me.
(BTW, for those who think as I do, I think this is a pretty friggin significant development. I can hear the rest of you yawning because it has nothing to do with emojis, bitcoin, or downloading copyrighted entertainment material without paying for it.)
Someone had to do it.