| Cancer research is not an easy field and many are better than me in that regard. But food for thoughts: A screening test with 30% false positive is not a great test. One in three test takers would be positive, requiring more investigations (likely many more). Let's say 1000 asymptomatic person take the test, 300 will test positive. Physicians then have to investigate thoroughly those patients. $$$ for those tests, hours of work missed, and very importantly patient anxiety and potential harm (a prostate biopsy, for example, is not trivial and people can die from that) of those 1000 people screened, 1 has the disease. With a 0% false negative rate, we catch it. Because of the test, it was caught early. Have we really changed his outcomes? would he have discovered it by himself a few weeks later, not impacting any of his treatments? The convention of "catching cancer early will make it easier to cure" is not always true. In the meantime, we've had to put 300 people through useless agressive investigations... Moreover, 0% false negative would be revolutionary. -- 0% and 100% are extremely rare in medicine. Anyhow, screening, especially its drawbacks is one of the most complex concept to explain. For genotyping and targeted treatments: it's been tried but we're still not there yet. The papers coming out are disappointing in that regard. |