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
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In order to check if something is cancerous, you need a physical piece of it, which usually involves stabbing it with a needle. So if it’s somewhere like the brain, you have to stab them in the brain. To be fair, it’s a very small stab, but you are still stabbing them. There’s inherent bleeding and infection risks involved.
On top of that, you can absolutely stab someone (usually in the lung) for what turns out to be an extra thick glob of mucus or something equally innocent
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).
Good question.
I was diagnosed with BC at 21 even though I was begging to be screened at 15 when my lump showed up.
Now I give talks to younger people about patient advocacy.
Because we in the US don’t have universal healthcare and cancer screenings are expensive – not as expensive as having cancer, for sure. But when you live in a country that has a for-profit healthcare system, the system is going to skew towards where the most profit can be made. Treating cancer is more profitable than screening for it
It depends on how complicated the test is. If it’s something that can be checked for with routine blood work, like prostate cancer for example, then there’s really no downside to doing it regularly at any age. Some stuff is a lot more complicated to check for. If you want to get checked for colon cancer you generally have to get a colonoscopy done and that is a very invasive procedure that you have to prepare for and there are limited resources for everyone to get those done. Also if you live somewhere like the US you might have to pay for it. Since it’s rare to get that kind of cancer before age 50 they won’t check you for it before that age unless you have a family history of it or are having symptoms that can’t be explained by a more likely cause. Same with breast cancer. Unless you find a lump or have a family history they aren’t going to make you do a mammogram regularly until you get to a certain age. They are painful and expensive. It’s all based on doing a risk benefit calculation. How likely is it to actually be cancer and is it worth doing an invasive test? It’s kind of like home security. People will generally lock their doors because it’s simple to do and there’s no real downside to doing it. But most people don’t take more intense steps like putting bars on their windows or installing expensive home security systems because it’s kind of a hassle. They only do it if they have a good reason to (bad neighborhood, bad experiences, lots of valuables in their house, drugs, etc)
As a survivor, there’s a couple reasons.
1, cancer often won’t show up in normal tests such as blood tests. The only way to really be sure is to do advanced imaging techniques and biopsies. 2, Those scanning machines are prohibitively expensive, and use a ton of electricity. On top of already long lines of patients waiting for scans who already know they have cancer. 3, Those advanced imaging techniques use CT machines and radioactive isotopes to measure sugar uptake by cells in your body that are cancerous (or normal organ behavior). CT scans work by shooting the patient with radiation. If you do this enough to someone, you’re actually *increasing* the likelihood of them getting cancer later on in life, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.
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