Healthspan and Longevity

Big picture, Cancer is a biological process. Some Stage 1 cancers may regress, but once you have Stage two, three or four that cancer, untreated, can kill you, regression is uncommon, less than one in a hundred cases. 

So, screening for cancer should be a no-brainer, the earlier you catch it, the earlier the stage and simpler the treatment. Yes, of course, but proving that is so complicated it is nearly impossible. As the treatments for cancer get better and better, it is paradoxically less beneficial to screen in terms of mortality, to design a trial powerful enough to detect a benefit of treatment to Lifespan becomes harder and harder. However, treatment of cancer is far simpler, less expensive, and dangerous to your health at an earlier stage. So, we recommend screening.

Our screening tests currently, such as Mammography and PSA (blood test for Prostate Cancer) will detect a high proportion of the screened for cancer but at the downside of a lot of false positives and extra investigations, such as MRI’s and biopsies, which come at a financial, physical, and psychological cost. 

The new liquid biopsy test (it detects a tumor’s DNA in a blood sample) is a big step forward and has an acceptable detection rate for stage 1 and 2 cancer with a 99.5% specificity. That is there are very few false positive results, only one in every 200 tests.So, if the test is positive, you most likely do have cancer, and, hopefully, at a stage where treatment is not only curative but less invasive and expensive than having cancer treated at a higher stage. This test is relatively expensive and has not been integrated into screening programs yet

When it comes to treatment, advances in profiling of cancers, using cancer DNA, allow the most effective and targeted treatment to be selected. We also now have biological drugs that allow your own immune systems to “see” the cancer and kill cancer cells, a huge advance for some cancers that are difficult to treat

There has been no change to our recommended screening programs, but that may change in the next year or two as more sensitive and specific tests become available