Urine test can detect brain tumors with 100% accuracy
yahoo.com
yahoo.com
See figure 3 etc: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsami.1c01754
Even the headline here (100% accuracy) is inaccurate; it had 100% sensitivity). The list of cancer bio markers which have turned out not to work for screening is quite extensive.
That said, the most interesting thing here is the microRNA capture technology. If it can be scaled, it might be interesting.
> A urine test developed by researchers at the Nagoya University in Japan can pinpoint a person who has a brain tumor — regardless of its size or malignancy — with 100% accuracy, according to a new study.
They used samples of pee of people that were diagnosed with CNS tumors with other methods, so my guess is that they had already big enough tumors to cause problems, so "regardless of its size or malignancy" is probably too optimistic.
The article seems to indicate it can.
"It can be sterilized, produced on massive scales and completed by patients any time anywhere with “minimal effort,” according to the study published recently in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces."
Sounds kinda funny but I'm not joking.
Surreptitious drug testing the kids too.
Just be worried about holographic ads suggesting baby carriages or suppositories.
Why can’t I pee and have my pee tested every time I use my toilet?
Also, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/smart-toilet-...
It's not clear from the article that it is reusable, and how you must clean it in that case.
More data does not inherently mean more scares. If anything, it means that a false positive here and there will be less likely to upend someone's life, because doctors will be more focused on identifying trends, and will be more able to simply ignore outliers.
Is that the right characterization? If everyone got a test every year, then there would be 3% false positives, per the article.
Brain cancer cases are around 6-7 per 100,000 per year.
So that means simply screening everyone would produce around 99.8% false positives, wouldn't it?
Or, looking at it another way, there would be 400 - 500 false positives for every real one.
"More data" implies that you use it for something. If there is some kind of intervention, and it almost always is not needed, then it has to be that much safer, in order to not make people worse off in aggregate.
This has long been a controversy with mammograms, I think.
I had a blood test once where my electrolytes were somewhat out of whack. I wasn't called in for an expensive kidney scan or consultation with a urologist. I was called in for another blood test. The second test came back fine. I was likely dehydrated the day of the first test.
The availability of cheaper, more frequent testing means that the response to a single positive signal does not have to be as extreme. Thankfully my doctors office offers walk-in blood testing or my experience could've been a much more anxiety-inducing hassle.
I would think it would depend on the nature of what causes them.
I've also been told that if you need tests done, it's best to get them dome during the week. Sometimes in some places the weekend team is the "B team" or techs on Friday afternoon just want to get done and make more mistakes. This seems to be similar to the research done about patient outcomes being affected by their surgeon's birthdays being on the procedure date, etc.
I agree we need to improve this, yet we are in such an early age of medicine is basically a joke. There are nowhere near enough doctors to even scroll thru your tests, let alone to analyse them. The focus still is mostly on curing the most obvious symptomatic cases.
Also tests require tons of samples. IIRC there's over 2000 different blood tests. Unsure of minimum blood volume needed, but even at 1 ml that's already 30% of your total blood volume! I guess pee is easier lol.
This leads into the second part. Nothing happens in medicine without some risk. Sometimes the best way to "do no harm" is not to do anything. For examples, the repeated use of CT scans on a patient will increase their risk of cancer. It was estimated/theorized that the overuse of CTs may be leading to 50k excess or early deaths in the US each year. Obviously MRIs don't have the ionizing radiation, but they are more scarce and generally more difficult to schedule, so priority tends to go to patients with specific types of issues, generally ones confirmed by other tests that need higher resolution imaging (like a brain tumor found on a CT).
I do agree that simpler and cheaper tests can be thought of and viewed differently. Even today, most of the time any positive test will be confirmed with at least a retest. Sometimes the sample will be tested 3 times or even shipped to another lab(s) for thorough confirmation (many negative tests should be retested similarly too). If the doctor or lab that you're currently using uses just a single result, I would consider switching.