Is Home Testing for Cancers with a Blood Assay a Good Idea?

[BillTre]

Science magazine news reports on a blood assay for a number of cancers, done all at once.
It detected between 33% and 98% of cases with <1% false positives.
it uses a combination of detecting DNA and proteins.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Could this say be something you could test daily at home for or something you'd do in person with a yearly physical?

 

[BillTre]

Currently, it is not a cheap test (I think I read ~$500) and it probably has to be done in a lab.
From my reading, it would probably be a test for DNA markers and another test for some protein markers.
So I'm thinking like a blood lab test you get a physical rather than something you could do at home.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

So I'm thinking like a blood lab test you get a physical rather than something you could do at home.

I can't wait for at home tests. I'm so paranoid!

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Given that it's a blood test (the paper says they used about 7.5 mL of plasma), it's likely something that would have to be done at a doctor's office as most people would not have the experience or equipment to draw their own blood. At at home version would only be feasible if it were sensitive enough to work on a few drops of blood (<<1mL). Still, as with many of these types of diagnostics, it is very helpful to have a doctor or someone knowledgeable be able to help the patient interpret the test results.

 

[Laroxe]

While I'm sure these tests will become better and cheaper the idea of home testing every day would probably be a very bad idea. If you look at some of the problems associated with mass screening, the same problems would be present. Its quite likely that there will always be abnormal cells in our body which will never progress to causing disease, so any positive test would need repeated testing and further investigation. This would lead to increased cost and possibly expose people to invasive investigations or dangerous treatments, this was a problem with the PSA test for prostate problems. It may be that even simple things like yearly physicals should only really be done at ages where there are established risks, it might invite unnecessary interventions and add to risk.