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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.
That's pretty high for a test with a less-than-stellar detection rate (roughly 2/3 false negative for breast cancer and 1/3 false negative for pancreatic cancer).
My (statistically uninformed) gut says you're going to get a lot more extremely anxious people worse off from false positives than you're going to save with early diagnosis.
Hopefully it can be improved - both in accuracy and cost - because I'd gladly give a vial of blood to a lab every year for an 'all-clear'. I just don't see this as being a good option yet.
With the amount of profit surrounding cancer treatments, this tends to be a perfect weapon for corrupt business practices. I wouldn't be surprised if we magically start detecting cancer far more than the average after this test becomes part of a routine annual physical.
Take a good hard look at cancer drug revenue patterns over the last five years. Take a look at the mark-ups, and the out-of-pocket costs. It's fucking obscene.
You want to detect and cure the real disease? Cure the strains of greed that bring forth corruption.
> I can't see how anyone can actually claim it is non-invasive unless they have a way of getting your blood without actually having to penetrate your skin.
They infect you with a hemorrhagic fever first, then simply wait for the blood to come out on its own.
Do I have to think of everything?
... now is a method to cure cancer early.
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.
There's a hypothesis being developed that states that actually cancer is a lot more common than people might think, it's just that the immune system detects it and rejects most (maybe the vast majority?) of cancers before they become a clinically noticeable issue.
If suddenly we start catching cancers so early and start treatment, we might end up treating a lot of cancers that would have got destroyed by the immune system, thus possibly damaging folks far more with exposure to chemotherapy and unnecessary surgery.
I do think this theory has some basis in fact: once I had a growth on my face that I became certain was a basal cell carcinoma, the least dangerous form of skin cancer. However, before I managed to get medical attention on it, this growth got irritated, bled a little bit, and completely disappeared without even a scar. Standard treatment would have left a scar, so seemingly I was better off without any treatment.
so we can subsidize the rest of the world as usual
You're not subsidizing the rest of the world, you inveterate jackass. You're handing the pharma and insurance CEOs bundles of cash to buy their yachts. The rest of the world pays reasonable prices and moderates their corporate greed.
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.
The rational thing to do then is socialize medicine in the U.S. Then you can get closer to the $500 yourself and stop subsidizing the rest of the world.