[lucb1e]

Answering the question in the title...

> One study in 2020 found that 95% of asymptomatic patients had some type of "abnormal" finding, but just 1.8% of these findings were indeed cancer.

So a bit less than 1.8% of the time in this study

> Prenuvo's recent Polaris Study followed 1,011 patients for at least one year following a whole-body MRI scan. Of these patients, 41 had biopsies. More than half of the 41 were diagnosed with cancer.

That's 2.0%

Note that this doesn't mean that 1.7~2.0% of people have cancer without knowing it. It could be more:

> A negative scan doesn’t mean you’re disease-free. Some cancers and conditions simply aren’t visible yet or aren’t reliably detected on a one-time full-body MRI."

But also perhaps less, in a way:

> "You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life, and in cancer, we call that overdiagnosis," Vickers says.

[jml78]

Yep, I have experience with both. It found cancer for my wife and she was able to treat it immediately. Fully recovered.

It found a weird spot on me that turned out to a pancreatic rest.

The only reason we did the scans were because we were making a significant life decision that we didn’t want to have to backtrack if either got diagnosed with cancer within a year . We knew nothing was guaranteed but we wanted to do some tests.

[codethief]

> The only reason we did the scans were because we were making a significant life decision that we didn’t want to have to backtrack if either got diagnosed with cancer within a year .

Interesting. If it's not too personal, would you mind elaborating on the kind of life decision you were making?

I have never heard of anyone getting checked up for cancer before they make an important life decision. I mean won't a cancer diagnosis disrupt your life anyway?

[majorchord]

> You're finding something that never would have caused you any problem in your life

Is it though? Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?

[alexey-salmin]

There's a theory that the first-stage cancer is way more common than we think, it's just doesn't develop further most of the time, cause no symptoms and remains undiagnosed throughout the lifetime.

There's some support for this view because agressive screening for thyroid and prostate cancers increases the number of surgeries a lot but doesn't seem affect the mortality rates.

Risks from a surgery are non-negligible, if you perform it to treat a low-risk condition it may be a net loss in the end.

So you're technically right about the "early-detecting" part, but the "much easier to treat" step is problematic because it's unclear what a net-positive treatment looks like for low-risk cases. Probably it comes down to yearly monitoring of whatever was detected, not the actual treatment.

[sxg]

Yes, you could early-detect something, but the likelihood of this thing being life-threatening are extremely low. If you choose to manage this thing aggressively anyway, you have to undergo more invasive testing (e.g., biopsies, surgery, anesthesia, etc.) that all have small risks of catastrophic events. In most cases, the risks of more invasive testing outweigh the risks of just not pursuing any further workup.

Nothing in medicine comes for free—everything is a tradeoff.

[p0pularopinion]

> Isn't it possible you could be early-detecting something serious that is much easier to treat now vs when symptoms appear?

It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.

[paulpauper]

Yeah a 2% risk of having something which can easily kill you and is very expensive to treat, especially if you're not elderly and still have lots of life ahead of your, is not exactly trivial. I would want to know about this

[Snoozus]

That's not the case. Most of these wouldn't kill you. Many of those that would kill you would be spotted in time anyways.

And the few that would kill you and would otherwise not be noticed are so rare that the risk of the procedures on the others is considered higher.