then i remembered a month or so ago seeing this, and not knowing what to make of it.
Ageless also provides many other longevity therapies.
Curious to see how these hold up over the long term.
I get it every year. So far, so good!
Question for you, what do you do when it shows you may have cancer? Do you speak to your physician? Surely, this will change your life even if it doesn't need treatment for next 6 years? Does the treatment change? Can the treatment be done based on those results?
So many questions.
I'm hoping we find more stuff for Alzheimer's. My aunt and now mother have it. I fear that I am next and I am too scared of doing the DNA test to check for genes.
what about Europe?
In my field, we all think that CfDNA testing will eventually become a standard thing that will go along with your annual physical's blood test, because it has predictive/preventative abilities.
EDIT:
Adding these caveats:
1. There is a ton of nuance in the diagnosis, since most people have a small amount of cancer in their blood at all times
2. The screenings are 5-10k + follow up appointments to actually see if its real cancer
3. All in cost then could be much higher per person
4. These tests arent something that are currently produced to be used at mass scale
The usual story is that you’re just better off not knowing because you’ll end up doing more harm than good chasing every little suspicious diagnosis. Cancer happens all the time, but many times doesn’t lead to anything.
It's the same reason they pay for annual physicals in the first place.
This is not to downplay the potential benefit of early cancer detection... which is huge. And in the US/UK anyway, there are ongoing large trials to try to figure some of this stuff out in the space of blood-based cancer screening, as part of the path to convincing regulatory bodies and eventual reimbursement for certain tests. As mentioned, you can currently at least get the Galleri test out of pocket (<$1k, not cheap, but not exorbitant either), as well as whole body MRIs (a bit more expensive, ~$2-5k).
We do a lot of CT imaging in the emergency department and it sucks if we incidentally find an abnormal growth in a young patient's CT head. These are usually benign and often not worth performing brain surgery to get a biopsy.
People talk about the “immune system” but they are really referring to a number of systems the body uses to regulate itself, more or less successfully, around environmental pressures. The body is a system under tension, sometimes extreme tension leads to extreme success (success here being growth of power), sometimes it breaks the body, and sometimes the systems have been slowly failing for a while, and most treatments will not help. Medicine is only useful in the specific case where the power of the body would be promoted if not for one thing, that the body would be healthy, at least manageably so, without that issue.
Incorrect.
There are tons of cancers that hide and mask with symptoms common to other symptoms. Kidney cancer, for example, presents pretty similarly to both kidney stones and UTIs. Even blood in the urine isn't proof positive that anything is wrong beyond either of those conditions. And, by the time blood is in the urine, it's often too late.
Liver cancer is even worse. The first symptoms you get can be thought of as a simple pulled muscle, just a little ache in the back. By the time you have appreciable problems, like turning yellow, it's quite advanced and too late to really do much.
There are common cancers like colon, skin, breast, and prostate that more fit your description of being mostly harmless so long as you get regular screenings and eat healthy. But, for every part of the body, a cancer can form and the symptoms are very often invisible.
I'm unfortunately all too familiar with how cancer looks. My wife currently has stage 4 cancer that started as kidney cancer. She does not drink or smoke, gets enough rest, and is very active.
thanks for adding the caveats; they suggest that there are good reasons why it isn't clear cut that health care companies should pay.
- Sure, cancer can develop years before diagnosis. Pre-cancerous clones harboring somatic mutations can exist for decades before transformation into malignant disease.
- The eternal challenge in ctDNA is achieving a "useful" sensitivity and specificity. For example, imagine you take some of your blood, extract the DNA floating in the plasma, hybrid-capture enrich for DNA in cancer driver genes, sequence super deep, call variants, do some filtering to remove noise and whatnot, and then you find some low allelic fraction mutations in TP53. What can you do about this? I don't know. Many of us have background somatic mutations speckled throughout our body as we age. Over age ~50, most of us are liable to have some kind of pre-cancerous clones in the esophagus, prostate, or blood (due to CHIP). Many of the popular MCED tests (e.g. Grail's Galleri) use signals other than mutations (e.g. methylation status) to improve this sensitivity / specificity profile, but I'm not convinced its actually good enough to be useful at the population level.
- The cost-effectiveness of most follow on screening is not viable for the given sensitivity-specificity profile of MCED assays (Grail would disagree). To achieve this, we would need things like downstream screening to be drastically cheaper, or possibly a tiered non-invasive screening strategy with increasing specificity to be viable (e.g. Harbinger Health).
bookofjoe•2h ago