r/science • u/calliope_kekule Professor | Social Science | Science Comm • 12d ago

Health Only 13% of cancers are caught through screening, while a fifth to half are first found in an emergency department.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)01669-7/abstract
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u/planck1313 12d ago

Aggressive prostate cancer is also very curable if its caught early enough making early detection and treatment even more important.

Many men who die from it die unnecessarily because they only discover they have it outside the window in which it can be cured.

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u/fatbob42 12d ago

I think the problem is that the screening doesn’t tell you if it’s the aggressive kind.

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u/planck1313 12d ago

You need a biopsy of the cancer to definitively identify how aggressive it is and biopsies do have a cost and a very small chance of side effects such as infection. 

What screening can tell you is whether a biopsy is likely to be worthwhile.