My former boss got lymph node cancer and had to get PET scans for years after he was in remission to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread. Why couldn’t everyone just get one PET scan every year as a routine check up instead of all the other multiple screenings we are subjected to? Especially because liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, etc, don’t have simple tests, like mammograms, to detect them?
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For every test, there must be a balance between :
– it’s effectiveness ( % of detection *when* there’s something)
– the false positives ( % of false results when there’s actually nothing)
– the costs
Blindly scanning a healthy population will results in tons of false positives, with unnecessary biopsies, emotion stress , etc
It’s much more efficient to target these tests to the population at risk
Not ELI5 but if you’re not adverse to a little maths
positives results : [%Eff x %Disease]+[%FalsePos x (1-%Disease)]
So even if the test 100% effective and only returns false positive in 1/100 of healthy cases, If a disease is rare enough ( 1/1000 in population), then ~10/11 of “positive cases” would be in fact healthy
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