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Signs of cancer can appear long before diagnosis, study shows
- melling 7y agoAccording to Craig Venter, early detection is what we need to eliminate cancer: https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s
- rtny4821 7y agoEarly detection is what the industry wants so they can improve their 5-year survival stats. And of course increase the total addressable market for conventional treatment options
- sjg007 7y agoWe know early detection leads to more cures.
- bobbiechen 7y agoScott Alexander has an interesting blog post about this: Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades. More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative. [...] Suppose a certain cancer is untreatable and will kill you in ten years. If it’s always discovered after seven years, five-year-survival-rate will be 0%. If it’s always discovered after two years, five-year-survival-rate will be 100%. Better screening can shift the percent of cases discovered after seven years vs. two years, and so shift the five-year-survival rate, but the same number of people will be dying of cancer as ever. This post tries to figure out which narrative is more accurate. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-m...
- arrosenberg 7y agoCraig Venter has a vested interest in selling genomic cancer detection.
- kazinator 7y ago> The findings, based on samples from more than 2,500 tumours ... Findings based on tumors sound like 20/20 hindsight! If your crystal ball tells you where in a body tumor will develop five years from now, then if you look at the cells there, you might see some subtle signs that you know are not false positives. Somehow, I don't think I'm holding my breath for new screening tests.
- skwb 7y agoThe other important thing to take into account is the vast heterogeneity of cancers. Cancers have been shown to be VERY diverse in their genomic expression profile, meaning you're probably looking at a very small pinhole compared to the entire tumor profile if you sample via biopsy. This diversity helps explains why cancers may initially respond to a specific targeted therapy, but then may reoccur with resistance initial therapy.
- sjg007 7y agoThe idea is to take blood samples from a patient population every year for a few years and sequencing the cells and cell free DNA population in the sample. You do this for years until the patient is diagnosed with cancer. At that point you can look back to the original samples a look for any potential biomarkers that in retrospect could have predicted the cancer. You do this for a large number of people. Right now we take a tumor and look for known biomarkers.
- pintxo 7y ago... can appear in the genome long before ... > “What’s extraordinary is how some of the genetic changes appear to have occurred many years before diagnosis, long before any other signs that a cancer may develop, and perhaps even in apparently normal tissue,” said Clemency Jolly, a co-author of the research based at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
- thr483900 7y agoSigns of cancer appear every time you consume animal protein.
- thiscatis 7y agoAny sources for this? I'd like to learn more.
- errantspark 7y agoIn a word? No. There have been a couple studies done that suggest vegetarian diets are modestly cancer protective (~10% lower incidence). There have also been some that link increased meat consumption with increased risk of cancer. It's absolutely not clear that eating meat causes cancer. Dietary habits change your cancer mortality risk and being a vegetarian probably correlates with something like a 1-4% decreased risk. I would be wildly surprised if there weren't animal protein inclusive diets that are good in other ways that surpass the cancer risk reduction of "being vegetarian".
- r6754dw 7y agoYep, for example salmon and other fatty fish is widely recognized to be highly healthy food from cardiovascular point of view, and definitely doesn't increase cancer risk. I don't think even red meat is necessarily so bad - rather it's the fact people in wealthy countries eat way too much of it compared to what humans have done most of our species history.
- nradov 7y agoSome hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups such as the Comanche and Maasai primarily ate red meat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche#Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche#Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet
- bluGill 7y agoVegetarians are more likely than the general population to be non-smokers - an obvious cancer risk that many studies do not control for.
- foxyv 7y agoLately I've been doing 7 day fasts two times a year mostly to reduce visceral fat and reduce my chance of type 2 diabetes. However a lot of science is pointing to it being a good way to reduce cancer risk. Nothing definitive, but it's nice to think I may be helping my body fight possible cancer too. Maybe I will catch some of these things early during these phases where the genes are present but the cancer hasn't begun to be diagnosable or slow it down. I've also heard some doctors suggest that fasting during cancer treatment improves the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
- bitL 7y ago7 days fasting (electrolytes-only) gives me a week-long euphoria afterwards, but days 6-7 show some ugly symptoms of previous diseases, so persevering those is a bit tricky. It also leads to 10-12lb weight loss.
- agumonkey 7y agowhat kind of activities do you do during the fast ? normal work life or retreat / reading ?
- bitL 7y agoFirst 3 days normal stuff including intense HIIT training, then I try to relax in my spare time for the remaining 4 days (normal business). On the first day I might suffer from a slight headache if I was used to a lot of caffeine/sugar. On the second day I am the "smelliest", so it's best to have that one over the weekend when I don't have to be around other people.
- tartoran 7y ago> On the second day I am the "smelliest", so it's best to have that one over the weekend when I don't have to be around other people. I've never done a 7 day fast and before I do I'd like to be better informed. What do you mean when you say the smelliest? What does it smell like? Is there some kind of smell throughout the fast? Thank you
- skwb 7y agoWhile it is certainly interesting to hear of new developments for cancer screening, it must be taken in with the proper context. I see a lot of people without medical or public health training fall into the trap of thinking that any sort of screening mechanism is a net positive, without taking into consideration the "costs". For example, a lot of breast cancer screening has been highly controversial, because of either A) false positive diagnosis B) slowly growing cancers that are too aggressively treated. To properly assess the utility of a cancer screening technique, you need to look at specific long term metrics, such as mortality reduction, that can only be quantified using randomized controlled trials. On the other hand, there's many pitfalls for over treatment. Patients may die during surgery. Biopsy isn't a fun procedure to go through on the receiving end. There's a lot of emotional stress involved. Adverse reactions from chemotherapy/biological agents used to treat the disease. And all this is in the face of the fact that you may die from other causes such as a heart attack. Certainly I share the optimism with many that we can develop breakthrough cancer screening techniques, but it's irresponsible to let it interfere with rational decision making based on proper studies.
- kaitai 7y agoThis is a hugely important comment and given the demographics of HN, I'll bring up prostate cancer as an example. It is important to catch prostate cancer in younger men, as in younger men it tends to be an aggressive cancer and lead to mortality. Paradoxically, in older men, aggressive screening for prostate cancer is bad if you want men to live longer and healthier lives. To oversimplify a bit, old guys with prostate cancer tend to have slow-growing cancers and they will most likely die of something else long before the cancer becomes a problem. Overtreatment of prostate cancer among old guys leads to increased mortality due to the risks of treatment, as well as leading to decreased quality of life due to side effects of surgery. This is why prostate cancer screening guidelines have been revised over the last 3-5 years.
- DataWorker 7y agoIdentifying cancer doesn’t necessitate removal but point taken.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago>The findings, based on samples from more than 2,500 tumours and 38 cancer types, reveal a longer-than-expected window of opportunity in which patients could potentially be tested and treated at the earliest stages of the disease. One issue with this might be selection bias towards cancer. What is the baseline rate of finding these type of mutations in people that do not develop cancer? There are cells going bad all the time in the human body, but because of factors such as the immune system, they actually don't cause any problems. One example of this kind of thing is prostate cancer. Prostate cancer used to be aggressively treated often with a lot of side effects such as not being able to control urine and sexual dysfunction. However, further research showed that a lot of these cancers either don't continue to progress or progress so slowly that the patient will die with the cancer rather than from the cancer, and so not doing anything is the best course of action. Overall this is an exciting development, but it will take a lot more research to know what should be done with that information, and to avoid over-treating which has its own downsides.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoMy friend 40 years young died of cancer yesterday. Fuck Cancer. I know this doesn't add much to the conversation. My apologies.
- Arelius 7y agoHey, maybe it doesn't contribute much to the conversation. But it's a super rough thing, and dealing with your grief in the ways you are able to is super important. And as long as you're not taking it out on other people, which you clearly are not in this comment, I figure it's a good thing. It's always amazes me when such an awful thing happens how the world keeps on spinning, when it really feels like it should just not be able to, but maybe there is ultimately some comfort to be found in that. Anyways, I really have no idea what you're going through, the loss of any relationship is a very individual experience, but you have my deepest sympathies, I really do feel for your loss.
- cactus2093 7y agoObviously human bodies are not machines, they're much more complex and less understood than computer hardware, but I can't help but think of the analogy to running web servers. Medicine today seems a lot like running a web app and never knowing if anything is broken unless users complain. It sort of works, but with good monitoring and alerting set up you can catch issues earlier or prevent them altogether. And the stakes with your body are much higher than just a web app going down, the difference between catching something like cancer a few months earlier is literally life or death. From what I've read in threads like these, almost everyone in the medicine field is very opposed to moving in this direction, even seemingly in principle, and I really can't understand why. I get that doing certain tests can be invasive on its own, so the cost/benefit has to be considered on a case by case basis. This argument also as an analogy to operations - you get false positives on your webservers too, and sometimes people get woken up in the middle of the night for no reason. But we work to fix noisy alerts one by one, and things generally improve over time. Why is this not possible in medicine?
- ncphillips 7y agoIt's because of the idea of iatrogenics: harm caused by the doctor. If things are going wrong in a web server then intervention is almost always necessary. The human body can take care of itself, and most of the time it's better to let it. https://fs.blog/2013/10/iatrogenics/ https://fs.blog/2013/10/iatrogenics/
- SeriousM 7y agoSo the title tells me I could have symptoms before a doctor have seen me? Wow, that's amazing!