Devices & Diagnostics, Hospitals, Pharma

Why regular cancer screening might be overkill

The number of cancer diagnostics companies these days seems innumerable, each hawking a new way […]

The number of cancer diagnostics companies these days seems innumerable, each hawking a new way to screen some subset of the populace for a grave disease. Their argument? Early diagnosis = early intervention = avoiding early death.

But a great piece from FiveThirtyEight counters the idea of broad-scale cancer screening. It cites South Korea as a prime example: While cancer diagnoses have skyrocketed in that country, the number of cancer-related deaths has remained static. Why? Because these sensitive screenings pick up on cancers that likely won’t lead to any negative effect in the patients – but instead trigger costly and physically taxing therapies. This graph, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is pretty telling:

The article continues:

The harder we look for cancer — any cancer — the more we find. But most of these extra cases are ones like papillary thyroid cancers that never pose a threat. Researchers have a name for this — overdiagnosis, and it leads to another problem, overtreatment. Most people diagnosed with thyroid cancer get their thyroids surgically removed and must take hormone replacement drugs for the rest of their lives.

The fact of the matter is that cancer is highly unpredictable – so perhaps there may be a handful of “rogue cells” in a patient’s body, but there’s no telling whether they’ll proliferate into a harmful tumor or just stay put, the article says.

What is also interesting is how significantly screening guidances have changed over the past several years – and how they’ll likely continue to evolve. Take this American Cancer Society history of breast, cervical and prostate exams: Chronological History of ACS Recommendations for the Early Detection of Cancer in People Without Cancer Symptoms

 

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