More than 600,000 Americans are expected to die this year from cancer. The good news is that scientists are still working on improving the odds by finding new ways to expand the scope and accuracy of early testing. And they recently had a promising breakthrough.
Cancers are much easier to treat if they can be caught before they spread. And yet aggressive screening can have downsides: Recent data show that mammograms and prostate cancer screenings have led people to have unnecessary surgeries and other invasive procedures for cancers that were unlikely to harm them. Such tests can mislead us about our risks.
But more knowledge is power, and a new blood test has shown the power to detect multiple cancers — including ovarian and uterine cancer, for which there are no existing screening tests and usually no symptoms until it’s far too late for treatments to be effective.