Why isn’t everybody screened for cancer of all types more urgently?

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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

17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Some cancers don’t have any screening and those are included in the 1/2. Many cancers still will get missed even if you start screening decades earlier because they simply don’t occur until later in life. Most importantly, cancer screening is not perfect. When something has a low probability event, the odds of false positives increase especially when it is more important to catch all cases rather than miss a diagnosis. It’s a delicate balance though because cancer screening tests are not diagnostic and require more invasive (i.e. more dangerous) follow-up tests, or sometimes, the screening itself isn’t completely benign (e.g. anesthesia + risks of perforation from colonoscopy). If your false positive screening rate is too high, you end up causing *more* harm to the population than if you did nothing.

I also would venture there’s a major reporting bias amongst people. It is much more likely that you are seeing stories about people who were diagnosed with cancer than all the people who had screening tests catch pre-cancerous lesions. I know I’ve never seen anyone post about their parents’ or grandparents’ recent colon polyps or negative low dose CT scan or normal PSA. Honestly even a lot of stage I curative cancers are kept secret still.

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