While I wish the headlines were accurate if only for the sake of the thousands of Canadians who are directly impacted by cancer and their loved ones, the harsh reality isn't as rosy as the hype would lead you to believe.
First, cancer is not one disease. It's almost always the result of a mutation that causes the affected cell line to go wild and not obey the signals that keep things in control. That's why we're moving away from discussing cancer in terms of specific organs and more in terms of the specific mutations that have caused things to go haywire. The other huge change is that our understanding of the mutations is leading to therapies based on correcting the error or setting it right. We've made important advances but not nearly enough and there is so much more to be done.
One of the key areas that cries out for more work is the field of cancer detection, that is screening for relatively silent cancers before they can spread and get out of our grasp. We do a pretty good job screening for cervical cancer with regular pap tests and regular colonoscopy is a good start at trying to contain colorectal cancer but for most cancers there are no accurate screening tools.
That's why the recent headlines about a new tool to screen for ovarian and uterine cancer is so important. These are cancers that arise deep within a woman's body with few outward warnings until they are fairly advanced. This new test brings the promise of a relatively simple and painless screening process that may enable us to pick up the cancer while it's easy to treat. But the harsh truth is that this test is not at all ready to be brought into general use and unfortunately may never get there.
Why? Because so far they've only be able to show that the test has a pretty good chance of picking up cancer when we know that cancer is already there. What we're missing is proof that in the real world this test will not only find cancer but not generate too many false alarms (in scientific terms, too many false positives). If this test misses cancer at too high a rate it won't be good as a screening tool, but if to increase the detection rate it means we falsely accuse too many people who don't have cancer, you can easily understand how that could be almost as bad as missing the cancer. Consider the worry, the unnecessary and sometimes risky tests and treatments that a false positive can trigger and you will quickly understand that while I wish this test the best possible luck, it will have to prove itself before we can trust it. This will take a few years at least. In the meantime, we know that scientists will continue to push to find more and better screening tools. Let's wish them continued success.