What are the problems with earlier stage screening? Without knowing much about pancreatic cancer screening in particular, it sounds like it might be one of thos

What are the problems with earlier stage screening? Without knowing much about pancreatic cancer screening in particular, it sounds like it might be one of those screenings that aren't recommended "because of the risk of false positives", which is a failure of the medical system rather than a deficiency in the medical technology. Some cancer screenings aren't recommended below whatever age because if you have a false positive test, it may lead to worse outcomes due to anxiety, low trust in future tests, or large costs and risks from additional more invasive tests the doctors feel they have to recommend [0]. The medium term solution should be better education and cleverer processes for recommending the invasive tests - if the false positive risk is high, maybe just make sure they get screened again every year - but instead it's just to stop the screening. Pick your own narrative about whether the root cause here is poor application of medical ethics, fear of malpractice cases, or the principal/agent problem in health insurance. Having less information should never be advantageous. And if the benefits are marginal, doing millions of screens "for real" incentivizes improving the process far more then when it's just a research problem. Is early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer something like this that needs to be fixed in the "system" or just something we don't have the technology to do? [0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041220002224.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041220002224.h... - I'm sure there are better resources but just one paper about how early screening can be "bad" even if it's free.