With the odds of about 1 in 2 people getting cancer at some point in their lives, why isn’t it protocol for everybody to get screened for cancer of all types more often? Like maybe every few years starting at the age of twenty? It seems most times it get caught is when somebody is complaining of a symptom, often times too late.
In: Biology
In addition to things other people have said, the tests sometimes have false positives. So it might tell you that you have cancer when you don’t. And for some cancers due to the false positive rate is much higher than the actual rate of cancer. So if you have a false positive rate of 1%, but the cancer only impacts 0.1% of people, you have about 10x the number of false positives as true positives. So you only run the tests on people who have a greater chance of having it (via genetics, symptoms, medical history, etc).
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