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New blood tests promise to detect malignancies before they’ve spread. But proving that these tests actually improve outcomes remains a stubborn challenge
New blood tests promise to detect malignancies before they’ve spread. But proving that these tests actually improve outcomes remains a stubborn challenge.
In an accompanying Lancet commentary, however, the physician Richard Lee and the epidemiologist Hilary Robbins called the test’s over-all sensitivity “somewhat underwhelming.” A comparable number of cancers, they pointed out, had been found through conventional methods. The remaining eight were liquid tumors—leukemias and myelomas, diffuse diseases not easily contained or “cut out.” As the editorialists noted, “This finding raises important questions regarding the test’s ability to reduce cancer mortality at the population level.” According to Grail’s own framework, “three robust, ambitious and pre-specified criteria” were to guide the decision: a reduction in late-stage-cancer diagnoses between screened and unscreened groups, the test’s positive predictive value, and the total cancer-detection rate in each cohort.
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