- "Some cancer specialists counter these concerns, saying the surge in diagnoses is primarily a surge in detecting cancers that did not need to be found..."
This seems excessively paternalistic. If medical professionals hold a legal monopoly on providing diagnostic care, then decide it's better to just not diagnose things, it leaves patients with no way to discover life-altering information about their own health.
by makestuff
2 subcomments
- The rise in the preventative screening centers (such as prenuvo) that offer whole body MRIs will be interesting.
The research seems split on if it is worth it or just causes unneeded worry. Obviously if you catch something early then that is great, but there are a lot of people who have a ton of followup testing only to find out there is no issue.
There are also limitations with the level of detail a full body MRI can capture.
I could see it becoming similar to a colonoscopy where you get it like when you turn 30 or something and then every 5-10 years after that.
by JumpCrisscross
0 subcomment
- "The rise in early-onset cancer incidence does not consistently signal a rise in the occurrence of clinically meaningful cancer. While some of the increase in early-onset cancer is likely clinically meaningful, it appears small and limited to a few cancer sites. Much of the increase appears to reflect increased diagnostic scrutiny and overdiagnosis. Interpreting rising incidence as an epidemic of disease may lead to unnecessary screening and treatment while also diverting attention from other more pressing health threats in young adults" [1].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
- >The problem is that it is impossible to know if someone’s cancer will be deadly or not.
And that is the issue, I know 2 people who developed cancers when they were around 40, one died, the other person survived but had to be treated. So we close our eyes and hope for the best ?
- The term is incidentaloma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidental_imaging_finding
- The argument against screening is kind of like if you had a really inept fire department that ended up crashing the firetruck into other vehicles and buildings every time they were dispatched... and instead of figuring out how to have the fire department respond to calls in a better and safer way, you ban smoke detectors because then the fire department will only be called after buildings are confirmed to be already engulfed in flames.
- Medical reasoning is complex. It typically needs to consider second and third order effects (typically, how the public responds to a policy needs to be considered when updating the policy). It can't simply attempt to maximize the global health utility function (ethics, budgets, politics, and human behavior all get in the way).
If your reaction to something like this is an offhand "why don't you just...", or "experts don't matter", or "my grandma told me not to eat sugar because it feeds cancer", please, take a deep breath, and think twice before starting to argue with folks about this.
- The term cancer refers to hundreds of different tumors with widely various prognosis. The type and especially the differentiation play the crucial role. Such statistics are difficult to present.
In the case of autism the scientists believed that it increased lately but more careful research showed that this was due to early diagnosis.
- Consuming foods rich in antioxidants may help. "Research suggests that free radical molecules can add to the risk of health issues linked to aging. Some examples are heart disease, age-related macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease and cancer." https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
- Very interesting breakdown from Medlife crisis discussing this: https://youtu.be/BJ9soFmzYO8
by stevenalowe
0 subcomment
- “Dr. Welch said the number of unnecessary diagnoses could be lessened if doctors did less routine testing — and if doctors held back from pursuing every abnormality in asymptomatic patients.”
I pity this doctor’s patients
- https://archive.ph/NIptp
by stefantalpalaru
0 subcomment
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by samdoesnothing
0 subcomment
- Surely it has nothing to do with the proliferation of chemicals and microplastics into the ecosystem, water, food, etc. That would be absurd, after all, a Monsanto-sponsored study found that their pesticides are totally safe.
by adventured
2 subcomments
- It's from a dramatic rise in inactive lifestyles by younger people and a lot of sitting, with the predictable consequences. Behavior which would have been far less common before mass adoption of video games and personal computing in the home, and then everybody sitting/laying around their homes with their smartphones. Young people go out less, they have a lot less sex, they're far less social in-person. It all goes together.
These people under 50 were the first generation to sit around at home for long periods of time playing video games. The NES came out in 1985-86 in the US and home video gaming has been mass adopted since. From there add on the full adoption of sitting down at a computer for work in offices across the 1980s and 1990s. Then throw in the full adoption of home computing in the 1990s with Win3 & Win95 + GUI. And for the past 20 years, throw in the smartphone.
It's the sitting primarily, hours and hours of it every day.
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