5 ms·

Note this test is about early detection, not prevention. If your pancreatic cancer is detected early, you will still need to have your insides rearranged to get

by Gatsky 5y ago

Note this test is about early detection, not prevention. If your pancreatic cancer is detected early, you will still need to have your insides rearranged to get it out.

junon 5y ago
"Preventative care" refers to the field of medicine called preventative medicine/care/health, which specifically aims at making regular checkups and other monitoring facilities free and accessible in order to improve health via early-detection. Oftentimes, doing these sorts of things lowers your insurance premiums or makes costs lower if something does happen (not always, but sometimes). These sorts of things are also generally free as it costs the insurance company less in the long run if you're doing them frequently enough. Perhaps a bit of a misnomer, but "preventative care" doesn't necessarily mean medicinal prevention of any sort.
dannyw 5y ago
That's a critically better health outcome though. It's like fixing a corruption bug when you detect it on one server, versus finding out there's corruption in every shard and all of your backups.
- carlmr 5y ago
  Ransomware infecting one machine or all machines including backups would also be a good analogy.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > That's a critically better health outcome though. Not necessarily. It depends on how old you are, what your genetic make-up is, whether the cancer is growing rapidly, whether it has easy access to other organs to spread to (or has already begun to do so) and so on. It's not a binary thing.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  I’m not saying it isn’t a great development. It certainly adds an option for early detection of some cancers where there previously were none. But it isn’t cancer prevention. It is a highly sophisticated technical undertaking which for educated and motivated patients in well resourced health systems will reduce cancer mortality and morbidity by some increment. Depending on many factors this could be a big or small increment. In the real world the efficacy will be less than what the trial shows. It is also likely that Grail (with north of $1 billion in VC funding) will charge as much as they can for this test. The size of the trials necessary to prove efficacy means that there will be highly constrained competition in this space. The distinction with prevention is important, because we ultimately must aim for preventing almost all cancers, and not be content with anything less than that. Disclaimer: I’m an Oncologist.
petra 5y ago
There's a big difference(in success rate, in damage to the body, in costs) when treating a tumor at 1 cubic mm size or less, versus a big tumor, versus a malignant tumor.
plank_time 5y ago
There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer. So we don’t know what we can do yet. Right now by the time we detect it, we are dead. An entire generation of early detection might create new methods to treat it. We don’t know what we don’t know.
- aembleton 5y ago
  > There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer The third paragraph of the article says otherwise. Do you have some knowledge about this test not working?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

by Gatsky 5y ago

Note this test is about early detection, not prevention. If your pancreatic cancer is detected early, you will still need to have your insides rearranged to get it out.

junon 5y ago

"Preventative care" refers to the field of medicine called preventative medicine/care/health, which specifically aims at making regular checkups and other monitoring facilities free and accessible in order to improve health via early-detection. Oftentimes, doing these sorts of things lowers your insurance premiums or makes costs lower if something does happen (not always, but sometimes). These sorts of things are also generally free as it costs the insurance company less in the long run if you're doing them frequently enough. Perhaps a bit of a misnomer, but "preventative care" doesn't necessarily mean medicinal prevention of any sort.

dannyw 5y ago

That's a critically better health outcome though. It's like fixing a corruption bug when you detect it on one server, versus finding out there's corruption in every shard and all of your backups.

carlmr 5y ago
Ransomware infecting one machine or all machines including backups would also be a good analogy.
jacquesm 5y ago
> That's a critically better health outcome though. Not necessarily. It depends on how old you are, what your genetic make-up is, whether the cancer is growing rapidly, whether it has easy access to other organs to spread to (or has already begun to do so) and so on. It's not a binary thing.
Gatsky 5y ago
I’m not saying it isn’t a great development. It certainly adds an option for early detection of some cancers where there previously were none. But it isn’t cancer prevention. It is a highly sophisticated technical undertaking which for educated and motivated patients in well resourced health systems will reduce cancer mortality and morbidity by some increment. Depending on many factors this could be a big or small increment. In the real world the efficacy will be less than what the trial shows. It is also likely that Grail (with north of $1 billion in VC funding) will charge as much as they can for this test. The size of the trials necessary to prove efficacy means that there will be highly constrained competition in this space. The distinction with prevention is important, because we ultimately must aim for preventing almost all cancers, and not be content with anything less than that. Disclaimer: I’m an Oncologist.

petra 5y ago

There's a big difference(in success rate, in damage to the body, in costs) when treating a tumor at 1 cubic mm size or less, versus a big tumor, versus a malignant tumor.

plank_time 5y ago

There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer. So we don’t know what we can do yet. Right now by the time we detect it, we are dead. An entire generation of early detection might create new methods to treat it. We don’t know what we don’t know.

aembleton 5y ago
> There is no early detection for pancreatic cancer The third paragraph of the article says otherwise. Do you have some knowledge about this test not working?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]