Should you have a commercially advertised cancer detection test? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Depending on your media exposure you have likely seen commercials or advertisements for cancer detection tests that look for markers of the disease in your blood. Now a new study examines these tests and determines that they’re really not ready for prime time. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, looks at the data.

Nelson: The best of these multi cancer detection tests was only 42% sensitive for early stage cancers so it can detect some of them but it's not that good at detecting them. None of them are and the best one was about 89% sensitive for late stage cancers, which means it's missing one in 10 or more. In addition a false positive, whereas I told you that you might have cancer was varied in the different tests between 1 1/2 to almost 24%. That means one in four times you're told you have cancer you don't.    :32

Nelson says the possibility that a person will be needlessly worried or overconfident is high, so he counsels giving such screening tests a miss for now. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.