3 ms·

You can follow-up when it's warranted. See the below anecdote. I'm guessing as to the details, but perhaps the thyroid was cancerous early, but it was too indet

You can follow-up when it's warranted. See the below anecdote. I'm guessing as to the details, but perhaps the thyroid was cancerous early, but it was too indeterminate, so they did nothing. But then when it started growing, they could change the approach. It's a piece of date, to weigh amongst the overall mix. The problem is most people will demand too much action. "Bob Nelsen says that he has a family history of cancer, so began getting annual Prenuvo scans around 10 years ago. - The early scans showed a nodule in his thyroid, but doctors didn't believe it was problematic. Then a scan in 2018 showed that the nodule had changed, which isn't supposed to happen in healthy people. - "When I went into Stanford for surgery, I asked how many patients they'd had with five years of longitudinal data on their thyroid, and they said I was the first," Nelsen tells Axios. "The medical profession is trained to be reactive, not proactive." - He adds that the scans also discovered a small scar on his brain, which he assumes came from falling off his bike and getting knocked out when he was 11 years-old."

vikramkr 3y ago
You know whether or not it's warranted before you run the test. That's the whole point of the discussion around when preventative testing is appropriate. The key is that the test is just one additional data point. Before running the test - you want to make sure that the data from the test will be useful for whatever purpose you want the test for (false positives could be ok if the point is to minimize false negatives). That way when you run the test, it's always "warranted" to follow up if needed. We do mammograms for healthy seeming people all the time - it's totally feasible that we'll determine that these new approaches are informative enough to become recommended for the general public, but we're still on that scientific journey

vikramkr 3y ago

You know whether or not it's warranted before you run the test. That's the whole point of the discussion around when preventative testing is appropriate. The key is that the test is just one additional data point. Before running the test - you want to make sure that the data from the test will be useful for whatever purpose you want the test for (false positives could be ok if the point is to minimize false negatives). That way when you run the test, it's always "warranted" to follow up if needed. We do mammograms for healthy seeming people all the time - it's totally feasible that we'll determine that these new approaches are informative enough to become recommended for the general public, but we're still on that scientific journey