Are there aspects to blood testing for colorectal cancer that undermine screening? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A new blood test for colorectal cancer finds advanced cancers well, but William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says when compared to the gold standard colonoscopy, or even stool tests used for screening, it falls short in very critical ways.

Nelson: Those tests have a pretty high negative predictive value even for the precursor lesions so one question is if you were to use this instead of the stool testing or instead of colonoscopy would you undermine the whole logic of screening? In other words you're not doing early detection anymore, I think advanced cancers how helpful would that be? That was balanced against are there people who don't want to do stool testing or don't want to get a colonoscopy and they might be willing to get a blood test is this better than nothing.  :31

Nelson says blood test screening for colorectal cancer just isn’t ready to replace the other options that are tried and true, but he’s optimistic that over time these tests will improve. He hopes everyone will consider screening as colorectal cancer cases continue to increase, especially among younger adults. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.