NFT: Simple blood test could diagnose cancer(?)

the next series of assessments. Thanks for sharing.

a game changer. It would be especially a game changer in pancreatic cancer. Here's hoping it can be validated!

But medical technology like this will only continue to accelerate.

Very few unintended consequences, if any, to this achievement, but other medical technologies can have significant side effects. Still makes most, if not all of them, worthwhile.

But this has significant implications. Early detection of cancer, and the ability to check during annual physicals is immense.

This has the chance to mitigate most of the non-aggressive cancers, which will significantly reduce mortality rates.

More ways to detect cancer, more ways to treat it, more ways to reduce the impact of diabetes, more ways to prevent heart disease, more wearable monitoring devices, more ways to dispense medication in accordance with these monitoring devices, etc. The largest multiplier is on post-retirement life expectancy.

The implications of this for society are quite mixed--or worse--even as they are great for the individual. Long post-retirement life expectancies are very, very expensive, both for society and for individuals who aren't prepared for them financially.

a natural limit to our life expectancy.

Obesity and average weight are also going to skyrocket with these advances.

There will be a lot of results positive for cancer, as very many have some sort of cancer, many of which are indolent or slow growing. When you have a positive test, what do Drs do next? where do they look for the cancer? In the colon?, in the pancreas? In the lungs? The liver? The esophagus? What sort of diagnostic tools or imaging do they use to look in all these places? Many questions to be answered.

I'd guess that the follow up exam to a general "cancer positive" result would be looking at specific cancer marker blood tests, where they exist. Those are expanding all the time too.

One huge bitch about cancer is that the disease can be asymptomatic for years, but at least this first test would point the primary care MD in the right direction for symptomatic cancer.

My mom died of bone cancer at 65; she'd almost surely had it for well over a year but her 1er care doc kept referring her to nerve specialists re her joint pain, huge fucking error on his part. This would eliminate those kind of diagnostic errors at least...

to be an accurate and useful test. 208 subject is a pretty small cohort for assessing a test like this; usually thousands of patient samples are needed for validation. Moreover, there are other types of stress and disease that can influence DNA damage/repair mechanisms in white blood cells. I hope it comes to something useful, but time and money will be needed to tell.

In comment 11790920 River Mike said:

Quote:

There will be a lot of results positive for cancer, as very many have some sort of cancer, many of which are indolent or slow growing. When you have a positive test, what do Drs do next? where do they look for the cancer? In the colon?, in the pancreas? In the lungs? The liver? The esophagus? What sort of diagnostic tools or imaging do they use to look in all these places? Many questions to be answered.

Very good point. One thing doctors will look at will be any symptoms the patient might have.