Medical Advices Blog

Can preventive diagnostic methods to detect cancer before it causes digestive symptoms?

In medical jargon is called screening (in English, screening) or early diagnosis process performed by the doctor to find and confirm or refute the diagnosis of a disease in people who show no symptoms of this disorder. The aim is to detect tumors at an early stage so they can be treated with more success than if they were leaving forward. In Spain, as in other developed countries, there are programs for early diagnosis of breast cancer and cervical cancer for women. In the case of digestive tumors have also been proposed such programs. But each type of cancer should be considered separately by its distinctive features. The principles that must be met for a program of early diagnosis are:

- The disease must be sufficiently frequent in the population or group of people under study and its consequences have to be very relevant to the health of the person (otherwise, the benefit obtained from a single patient would not justify the discomfort caused to everyone else).- The diagnostic test performed must be simple, cheap and reliable.

- There should be an effective treatment for the disease.

The last condition may seem easy because the surgery is an effective treatment for these tumors digestive if diagnosed early. But this is not always true. Many tumors release small groups of cells or “micrometastases cells” into the bloodstream or the lymph nodes very early, so that removing the primary tumor can not guarantee at all the patient’s recovery. In these cases, the patient’s immune response appears to be as important to the development of cancer as the speed in diagnosing and treating the primary tumor.

credit to: Dr. Julio Mayol Martínez, Dr. Jonathan Rhodes

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