Daniel Flora, Medical Oncologist and Hematologist at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, shared on LinkedIn:
“Over-treatment is common in cancer care. I know that because I see it every day as an oncologist. The reasons are many, including human psychology.
Addressing it needs to be a priority as we adopt new screening models and shift our focus to cancer interception.
A cancer diagnosis brings urgency to act, for both patients and cancer doctors.
We are getting better at finding all cancers, but with that, we are also discovering cancers that would never have caused a problem during someone’s lifetime. The issue is we still don’t know with certainty how aggressive a cancer will turn out to be when it’s caught so early.
It comes down to gaps in scientific knowledge but I think these gaps are narrowing with better biomarkers and genomic data. Oncotype changed the entire paradigm of breast cancer treatment. We need more of this research to be funded by our government and biotech because there is little incentive for pharma to do it.
AI, of course, is a huge opportunity on both sides of this problem. Along with helping us find cancer earlier, it may help us understand better how that cancer is going to behave. Combining molecular biomarkers with radiomics – patterns within medical images – may help us distinguish cancers that need treatment from those we can safely monitor.
Showing that these tools can guide care safely will require a huge financial investment to run prospective studies and have long-term follow-up.
Our ultimate goal is to cure more patients while causing less harm. As our ability to find cancer improves, our ability to decide what to do about it needs to keep up.
Repost if you agree!”
You can also read:
Sibylle Loibl: Incorporating sTILs to Prevent Overtreatment in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer
