No Evidence that Cancer Screening Saves Lives

Wow. I'm shocked that cancer screening hasn't led to immortality!

Ok, yes, I'm being facetious. But there is a larger point here that appears not to have been addressed: Does cancer screening lead to therapies that maintain or improve quality of life and allow patients to live longer?

I think most people would want cancer screening if early detection means that they can avoid pain, avoid a radical change in lifestyle, or avoid becoming a burden to their families.

I had a young family member who avoided any regular check-ups with the doctor until at one point he became very ill, and was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. He died within a few months. I feel confident that had he seen a doctor a year or two earlier, his cancer would have been detected in an early stage and he would have had lived at least a few years longer. He also would have had more time to plan the disbursement of his estate, sparing his family that financial headache.

The problem with statistics is that they look at whole populations. As an individual, if 99 out of 100 screenings were wasted, what if you are a 1%'er?

However, I do believe that a measured approach is called for based on family history/genetics, lifestyle, general overall health, and (gasp) one's ability to pay.

This is a classic case of using statistics as smoke and mirrors to produce a headline or to justify an otherwise unjustifiable research grant. The two morality rates are not directly comparable. The disease specific mortality rate clearly shows that screening works.The overall mortality rate is calculated in a different way. We all die at some point so the number of deaths is fixed at 100% (ignoring Lyndor's elixir of life which is so expensive they have yet to make their first sale) The mortality rate therefore depends on the proportion of the population dying in any one year which is a function of average lifespan. As the first generation of cancer survivors has passes through the average lifespan increases. Thereafter further cancer survivors merely sustain the increased lifespan but do nothing to increase it further. So the mortality rate variation based on cancer survivors alone shows no change, which is what was observed but is also what was plainly obvious without an expensive study to prove it. Further it would not be possible to isolate one a single contributory factor to overall mortality. The UK population is 64½ million, and rising at approximately ½ million per year. A substantial portion of the rise is caused by immigration or first generation offspring of immigrants coming from countries where to average lifespan is lower than the UK's. This skews the figures obscuring any underlying increase in the lifespan of the long established population.

"They say that while there is evidence to suggest that screenings reduce disease specific mortality, overall mortality is either unchanged or negatively affected."

"...screenings reduce disease specific mortality..." Screening for lung cancer allows early treatment and reduced mortality from lung cancer, screening for skin cancer allows early treatment and reduced mortality from skin cancer, etc. In other words, "If we're looking for it and we find what we're looking for, we can treat it." aka, "It works."

"...overall mortality is either unchanged or negatively affected..." If we're screening for cancers and we find them, and the person later dies from a cancer-related symptom, it's marked off as "Death from cancer," If we don't look and an undiagnosed cancer kills the patient, it's marked off as "Natural Causes" or "Cause Unknown."

That one sentence spun the statistics so hard you could hook up a generator to it and use it to power the Great Ormond Street Hospital(1) for a year.

Now I need to check out the original article to see how bad it really is...

Notes:

1. The Children's Hospital that owns the 'perpetual copyright⁽²⁾' for the play Peter Pan: the Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up
2. Not a 'true' copyright, as they do not have creative control over the play or the characters, and does not include the right to refuse permission to use it. The 'copyright' only grants GOSH royalty payments on productions of the play⁽³⁾.
3. And the royalty payments are going to a Children's Hospital, for crying out loud. You have to be a Grade A, Double-Refined, Triple-Filtered A-Hole to not want to give a Children's Hospital their fair share payment.
   

I wonder if Cancer Screening has improved in the last decade. I would expect it has, and in view of improving techniques/detection, will these results still hold up? What was the timeframe of the analysis? I would imagine that they must consider data going back decades when screening technology wasn't nearly as good and probably more harmful.

There is no cure for cancer...except when you are misdiagnosed, which happens often...

While it is true that there is no 'magic pill' that makes all the cancerous cells in your body die at the same time, while leaving your healthy cells along, there are several ways to effectively remove cancer from a person's body, depending on the type of cancer, and how early it is spotted.

An extreme case for 'easy to get rid of' is melanoma, skin cancer. if spotted early, before it metastazises, the doctors can just trim the tumor off, taking a little 'healthy skin' all around it (covering the buffer zone of 'we know the main tumor mass stops there, but has it sprouted 'tendrils' we can't quite see yet?') and then stitching the 'extraction site' closed.

Now if you get bone cancer, marrow cancer, or blood cancer, then it's a lot harder to get rid of, you may be leaving entire limbs behind when you finish the treatment, and a tumor deep in the brain, there's no way to even GET to it without turning the patient into a vegetable.

But the blanket statement of 'There is NO cure for cancer' is about as accurate as saying 'I have never seen a black sheep myself, therefore there are NO black sheep.'

Surgery isn't a cure, it's a delaying tactic....

SE, EVERYTHING in life is either a delaying tactic in the slow march towards the grave, or a headlong rush to get to the grave quicker.

And with the cancers that have an external source (Melanoma, for example, tends to be caused by excessive UV damage to skin cells, and lung cancer has 'smoking' as a strong factor in its 'causes' list) if you remove the source of the damage, (by limiting your unprotected sun exposure, or by quitting smoking) the odds of remission decrease significantly.

Take it from a survivor -- and from the American Cancer Society: screening methods have improved dramatically and are indeed life-saving.

"Death rates from breast cancer have been declining [in the U.S.] since about 1989, with larger decreases in women younger than 50. These decreases are believed to be the result of earlier detection through screening and increased awareness, as well as improved treatment."

Screening technology continues to advance, thankfully; a market with the potential for tens of billions of dollars in revenue encourages that.

A new company called GRAIL, funded by $100 million from, among others, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos aims to offer blood tests for around $500 for early detection of cancer by 2019. The blood tests would be unique among current widespread screening techniques in that they would use intensive DNA sequencing to look for patterns of telltale mutations.

Parent company Illumina CEO Jay T. Flatley said that this new technique would be useful because GRAIL would figure out cancer's mutation signatures by doing DNA sequencing on 30,000 to 50,000 people over time, a portion of whom would have or develop cancer.

Hopefully this screening technique will be more effective at countering the false positives and overdiagnoses common among cancer screenings today.

Surgery = take enough out and you STILL die, only sooner rather than later.

Bogus.