I feel like you're missing the point. Yes, false positives have risks. But if blood tests (or in the case of bowel cancer, fecal tests like cologuard) are effective, we can replace more invasive screening options with them. People have historically been encouraged to get colonoscopies once they reach a certain age because, for the general population, the risks of cancer are higher than the risks associated with a colonoscopy above the age of 50. Developing less invasive tests lets us lower that age, catching more cancers, while at the same time making screening safer for people already in the recommended screening window.
Also, pancreatic cancer, which is what the original article is about, has no alternate form of screening. Most people only find out they have it once it's already symptomatic, which is usually stage 3 or 4
> But if blood tests (or in the case of bowel cancer, fecal tests like cologuard) are effective, we can replace more invasive screening options with them.
That is not what I'm arguing against. People in this thread are talking about testing earlier and more often because we have these new tests, not "just" replacing existing tests.
The math is very unlikely to work out that we should do that.
Howso? Existing solutions vs more widely deployed and frequent blood+fecal tests followed up by existing solutions in the case of a potential positive?
These things are already taken into account via population scale statistics. In most cases, it's at best debatable whether more or less screening leads to an overall better outcome across the entire population aggregate. The argument against more screening is that it can (and the claim is it does) lead to overall worse outcomes in aggregate. For any individual case however, the story may be totally different.
What we need are better mechanisms to bin positive results to steer people towards a finer grained course of action. That'd change the math to be more of an overall net benefit.
Also, pancreatic cancer, which is what the original article is about, has no alternate form of screening. Most people only find out they have it once it's already symptomatic, which is usually stage 3 or 4