>I wonder the same things about cancer and I believe that in the past 50+ years we have identified more types of cancer. I wrote a long post about this a few w

>I wonder the same things about cancer and I believe that in the past 50+ years we have identified more types of cancer. I wrote a long post about this a few weeks ago but the long story short is YES! We absolutely have detected more (asymptomatic) cancers with increased screening of healthy people. Here's my previous post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9621249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9621249 Here's some random links: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/screening-for-disease-in-people-without-symptoms-the-reality/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/screening-for-disease-i... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screening-tests/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-scr... >Prostate cancer is very common but isn’t always harmful. It is found in 80% of autopsies where the men died of something else. Many more men die with prostate cancer than because of it. >The screening test for prostate cancer is a blood test for prostate-specific antigen (PSA). This is not a yes-or-no test. It must be interpreted in the context of the patient’s age and risk factors and the rate of rise, and any cut-off level is arbitrary and will miss some small percentage of cancers. If the PSA test is positive, the next step is biopsy. Typically, 12 needle biopsies are done, 6 on each side. They find cancer in 25% of patients. But if you go back and do more biopsies, you’ll find cancer in 25% more patients. Theoretically, if you could see every cell in the prostate, you might be able to find a cancer cell or two in almost everyone, most of which would never progress or kill the patient. So you have to decide how many biopsies are reasonable. If you find cancer on a biopsy, the next step is treatment, and treatments for prostate cancer are not benign. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-g... >we’ve assumed, he says, that cancers are all like rabbits that you want to catch before they escape the barnyard pen. But some are more like birds—the most aggressive cancers have already taken flight before you can discover them, which is why some people still die from cancer, despite early detection. And lots are more like turtles. They aren’t going anywhere. Removing them won’t make any difference. >Over the past two decades, we’ve tripled the number of thyroid cancers we detect and remove in the United States, but we haven’t reduced the death rate at all. In South Korea, widespread ultrasound screening has led to a fifteen-fold increase in detection of small thyroid cancers. Thyroid cancer is now the No. 1 cancer diagnosed and treated in that country. But, as Welch points out, the death rate hasn’t dropped one iota there, either. (Meanwhile, the number of people with permanent complications from thyroid surgery has skyrocketed.) It’s all over-diagnosis. We’re just catching turtles.