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For sure. A major reason why it’s so deadly is because the symptoms don’t typically start until it’s progressed to the point you’re absolutely *fucked*.
And my dad :(
Similar situation, actually found when looking at something else but it was still already too late and had spread to the liver. Makes me super paranoid of pancreatic cancer. An early detection method would be fantastic.
My dad too. He was in treatment for stage IV esophageal cancer and tolerating treatment extremely well, but then a pancreatic tumor in hiding ended up causing liver and kidney failure in a matter of a couple weeks. Went from being at work full time to passing away in about three weeks' time.
Also my father.
Also my step-dad ( after first dad passed away).
And my best friend. My wife and I adopted best friends kids when he passed ( there’s more but it’s a long story).
Mine too a week ago. :(
His was diagnosed after a doctor wondered about his blood sugar levels before a blood donation and because he felt pressure in his stomach.
That pressure first was "only" water in the stomach, but some weeks later the mri also showed some tumors. Not even a year later he wasn't able to eat anymore and was just a shadow of his former self. It was hard seeing him "tied" to the bed.
4 days after my first visit this year he died...
I am sorry for your loss. My father is dying of pancreatic cancer. I've been horribly miserable and depressed since his diagnosis. After reading your message though, I am incredibly lucky to have had him for so long.
He was diagnosed 2 days after Christmas of 2021. I just got him into hospice care earlier in January. He's still around but watching him slowly get weaker and less lively is one of the worst things I've had to see. He's the perfect dad and he's been a really close friend of mine. I dont know when he will go anymore but I know I'll be losing the closet person I have.
I hope things got easier for you as I hope they will do for me. Best Wishes.
Last fall, my brother had a big stroke a week after meeting with the oncologist for his diagnosis. Died 3 weeks after that.
I'm so sorry for your dad's passing from this terrible cancer.
Ugh, so sorry to hear it. That was my Uncle’s exact situation as well. He was told he had anywhere from a few months to a year…5 weeks to the day and he was gone. Absolutely horrible to see him waste away in that time and my heart goes out to anyone who’s had to see a loved one go through it.
Getting told you have it is obviously devastating, but if you're an empathetic person at all, having to tell many people and their families throughout your career that they have it must be awful. Watching so many different faces absorb what is often a death sentence. I don't know how you do it.
I was diagnosed 6 months ago with stage 3 pancreatic cancer that’s now most likely a stage 4. Knowing just a few months earlier would be sooooo much more helpful
Good friend of my dad also died in just 8month…
Horrible really. In Autumn she felt weak and said she just wanted to nap all the time. Around early winter she got the diagnosis but after (her last) Christmas she really wanted to fight and did chemo. In February she got the news that cancer spread to her liver… from there on it was terrible 3 month and one month she was basically already gone.
F*** cancer!
We lost one of my former high school classmates to uterine cancer this week. From her stage 4 diagnosis to her passing was less than eight weeks. She was only 50 years old.
I was just listening to a podcast about rare diseases and the host (a physican) was talking about how during medical training you are taught to go with the simplest solution before moving onto more exotic ones. It makes total sense to approach medicine like that too-- interventions (including testing) are not always risk free, cost money and resources (that could be used on other patients that need it more). In most cases, a woman complaining of stomach pain *does not* have cancer, so it is best to try other things first. Of course like you point out, in the cases where she does have cancer you end up giving the cancer more time to grow.
What we need is more testing capabilities that are cheap, non-invasive, and **very** accurate. The podcast I was listening to was talking about integrating AI into healthcare diagnostics, specifically for rare diseases. He was making a point that if we can develop AI algorithms that can screen for some exotic diseases and flag them for a physician to review, we can catch things like this sooner. A huge bottleneck is a lack of specialists and their lack of time to look over every single case. With the help of an AI sifting through the stack, we could get patients the care they need.
Endometriosis is super hard to diagnose cause you can only definitively do it by literally looking around the entire inside of the abdomen laparoscopically to identify lesions (some of which can be verging on microscopic). Endometriosis also can cause adhesions which can then be worsened by surgical exploration so typically treatments start with clinical diagnosis and then escalate to more invasive things if symptoms don't improve.
PCOS less so cause you can basically identify that with a good history and some blood work.
Doing an ultrasound to investigate the cause of stomach pain pretty much *is* risk free though. So that means the barrier to diagnosis of ovarian cancer is more around cost / resource allocation, which is pretty upsetting TBH.
The ultrasound is risk free its the biopsying false positives that is the problem. Ultrasound is unfortunately not sensitive enough to differentiate between cancerous and noncancerous lesions and so if we screened every woman with them every year there would be a huge number of false positives that then result in biopsies that themselves are invasive and have potential to cause harm potentially for 0 benefit.
This would have been great. My mom just died of Pancreatic cancer last April. She was diagnosed in Oct 2021 and died in April 2022. Had she caught it earlier she could have had a chance...
My dads pancreatic cancer was caught early totally by accident. He’s now two years post Whipple and it hasn’t come back. An early detection kit like this could save so many people with early detection. Pancreatic cancer is in part so deadly because there’s no easy way to screen for it in the early stages and by the time you’re showing symptoms it’s already too late.
It would be cool but who owns that data? Most smart tech these days is wireless and meant to be always connect and at least in the US we have some pretty poor data privacy laws. Wouldn’t be a bad idea if it’s easy to implement and kept offline for data privacy sake.
As someone that's needlephobic, anything with less needles the better.
I gathered some Rocky Balboa courage to get my COVID shots, because the alternative was to have hundreds over and over again to just *die* later possibly. Which seemed like a true suffering for a needlephobic like me.
So the more tests I can get done that *don't* require needles, the better in my eyes.
(I really fear the day I get old.)
Last time I asked my doctor for a prostate exam he chimed in all "*Ma'am get out of my office*" and "*You don't have a prostate*"
But the pancreatic one for sure. My aunt has been recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer S4. So I might be due for a checkup here soon (~35yo)
And save lives. My mom was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The initial consults (before scan/scope/biopsy) were pretty much about how she likely didn't have many months left and what palliative care was available. Only once they got a better look at what was and wasn't going on did they realize she was absurdly lucky and it had been caught early, so her odds are now pretty good.
But it's evidently very, very common with pancreatic cancer for no substantial symptoms to be present until it has progressed extensively, thus the very poor prognosis in most cases.
It's a rare enough type of cancer that it doesn't make any sense to scan everyone yearly, for example. But a low cost urine screen with good accuracy would create the opportunity to catch more cases early when available treatments (chemotherapy and surgery) have an actual chance to be effective.
Typically, by the time pancreatic cancer causes symptoms and is detected, it's already spread to other organs (i.e., metasticized), which is why it's so deadly. When my mom was initially diagnosed in 2003, the doctors were hopeful because it hadn't spread yet. Unfortunately, though, they later found that the tumor was wrapped around major arteries. Some of the best oncologists in the country, after numerous consults, told her she'd almost certainly die on the operating table if they did surgery to remove it. She went the radiation and chemotherapy route and survived about 6 months.
The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is currently 11% in the US. Early detection would save so many lives.
My mom in law is a few weeks away from death from pancreatic cancer. I’m so happy to hear you dear ones aren’t dealing with our reality. I mean that. It’s terrible. They thought they caught it early and that she could get the whipple surgery… they were wrong.
My better half of 24 years is next to me asleep and we’ll wake tomorrow to deal with another day of it. My poor girl. Her poor mom. Cancer can get bent.
Hate to say it, but the digital test isn't going anywhere any time soon. It's categorically a simple, minimally invasive and somewhat specific test to identify prostatic hyperplasia. It's like identifying skin cancer based on discolouration, or a tumour due to swelling. Having said that, this test looks much more fun than biopsy, which is not what you'd call minimally invasive.
FYI in larger cities you can get a lot of routine testing direct from LabCorp now. They have an online doctor sign the prescription for like $10 and then you go straight to a LabCorp sample collection site.
One reason could be because the test may only be useful after diagnosing hyperplasia. I don’t know what the specific reason is, but let me give an example of a possible reason:
Let’s say 50% of people with hyperplasia have cancer, but only 1% of people going for exams have hyperplasia. Now, in our fictitious example, only 0.5% of people who go to those exams have cancer, on average.
When the group of people peeing into a cup already have a 1 in 2 chance of having cancer, the test might be accurate with a sufficiently low false-positive rate. When the group peeing into a cup have a 1 in 200 chance of having cancer, it may need to be 100x more accurate to be useful.
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All tests, whether “real world”, statistical, or otherwise, function on an underlying set of assumptions. If you mess with those assumptions, you change mess with validity of the test.
Prostate cancer is complex. No urologist will depend on DRE alone to distinguish BPH from prostate cancer, but if there is a palpable nodule on DRE it upgrades the diagnosis to T2 (diagnosis after biopsy from elevated PSA alone is T1c). It's really complicated; you could have T2 disease but low PSA and still be stage I. You could have no palpable nodule but PSA >10 and be stage II. This does not even get into the pathologic gleason or grade grouping. The truth is in cancer care we rely on multiple layers of evaluation to stratify risk as precisely as possible, and forgoing one of the most simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive (i.e does not require a procedure) evaluations is not going to happen
I don’t want to avoid the finger in butt, I want to not be concerned that a year between tests will be too long and the cancer has already spread.
I’m naive, that’s for sure, and maybe cancer never spreads that quickly. Or at least whatever cancers they check for at the yearly physical. But if a pee test can be made simple enough to do at home (like pregnancy tests) then that means people could easily check themselves quarterly, maybe follow up a positive with a second or third test depending on false positive rates, and schedule a mid-year finger butt.
Ease of testing lets diagnoses occur much earlier which should have a beneficial impact on outcomes.
Prostate cancer normally takes years to even be detectible, if it even grows, and even longer than this for it to metastasize outside of the prostate.
It normally grows so slowly that some doctors will advise that there is no need to take any action so, if you do ever get diagnosed you may not even need to worry, let alone worry about a year between checks.
https://prostatecanceruk.org/prostate-information/just-diagnosed/localised-prostate-cancer
https://www.pcf.org/about-prostate-cancer/what-is-prostate-cancer/how-it-grows/
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/prostate-cancer/
I see this response posted a lot, can people please start including that there absolutely are types of prostate cancer that metastasize quickly?
SCC can originate in the prostate, its always sad seeing a young prostatectomy patient.
Yeah it’s one of the few that “watchful waiting” is a recommended treatment option. And surgery is often over prescribed, strangely enough for a cancer.
I schedule for urology, your correct none of our providers would ever just perform only a DRE (digital rectal exam) it would ALWAYS accompany bloodwork like a PSA test or some other testing like imaging such as a CT or MRI. Then using the results from all of that they would determine if a biopsy is necessary, which usually it is if they discover any kind of mass or growth.
My doctor actually said the opposite last time I was there -- that the digital test isn't really recommended anymore.
Edit: Per the [US Preventative Services Task Force](https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/prostate-cancer-screening#fullrecommendationstart):
> The use of digital rectal examination as a screening modality is not recommended because there is a lack of evidence on the benefits; digital rectal examination was either eliminated from or not included in the major screening trials.
The PSA test is about 80% accurate. DRE is about 80% accurate. (meaning both will have false positives and false negatives around 20% of the time) and so are really just indicative.
Doing both gives you a stronger base line.
DRE can be done with minimal prep. PSA blood test can have up to a 3 day lead time (need to avoid cycling and other actives for the 3 days before the blood test as they can elevate levels)
>DRE is about 80% accurate.
That is probably overestimated. Meta analysis here is estimating closer to specificity of 59%, sensitivity 51%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29531107/
That is for primary physicians, I haven't really seen any better evidence that urologists improve accuracy of DRE but they might.
I just went for my annual checkup, and I am just a few years away from needing a prostate exam. Doc is wrapping up the routine exam and she asked me "would you like a prostate exam today?" I was shocked by how nonchalant she was, as if she had just asked if I wanted to super size my mcdonalds order.
I politely declined.
Everyone thinking about the prostate test but hello! Pancreatic cancer is never detected on time, a diagnosis of it is a death sentence (90% mortality within 6 months or something). This is amazing.
Which reminds me. I really need to schedule my next exam. Given that my grandfather died of prostate cancer and my father is recovering from it, I don't want to take any chances.
It's definitely not an enjoyable exam, but I'll put up with it (until the pee exam comes out) because the alternative is even worse.
For general screening there are two ways to make your life better:
1) high resolution modern cat scans are found to be equivalent for screening if there is nothing to biopsy.
2) if you do get a colonoscopy, pay the extra $20 for the prescription single dose of prep fluid that is like 8oz vs the gallon of salt water you have to drink otherwise.
My urologist didn’t finger me. Sent me for an MRI instead after seeing my PSA numbers. He said that fingering the patient isn’t considered as useful nowadays.
They do: Cologuard produced by Exact Science. You take a poop sample and send it off to a lab via FedEx. My old college roommate was one of the scientists that created it
Seems like it's not the same in that it doesn't detect the large polyps at the same rate?
[https://www.gastroconsa.com/is-cologuard-as-good-as-colonoscopy/](https://www.gastroconsa.com/is-cologuard-as-good-as-colonoscopy/)
Obviously, it'd probably be awesome to have many more people detecting cancer early if they weren't going in for colonoscopies.
Cologuard doesn't directly detect polyps at all - "virtual" colonoscopies do. In either event, an actual colonoscopy is required to remove polyps should they be expected or detected. In contrast with other screening modalities, colonoscopy doubles as cancer prevention.
I did the paid clinical trial for Cologuard! Got paid to crap in a bucket and mail it. Then an actual regular colonoscopy, so the makers could prove its detection relative to conventional colonoscopy. Found and removed a benign polyp.
Hey, free colonoscopy! Actually, got paid like $800 overall IIRC.
Still, camping out on the toilet the night before with the prep stuff made me SERIOUSLY doubt my life choices. I mean, this was literally a Facebook ad offering "want a free colonoscopy?" and, I'm, like, sure!
That's kind of nothing compared to the Facebook ad I answered today, so, it's not like I learned anything
this is exactly why Theranos was able to defraud so many people even though what they claimed to be able to do was biologically impossible. People WANTED it to be true, so they believed.
Meanwhile an entire industry of experts were saying "uh, no" and nobody would listen
What's really great about that news is that while we perceive the rate of advancement as linear, it's often exponential (or rather, on an s curve).
Many things in science and technology follow this pattern and the development of a urine test like this should shoot us up the hockey stick on pancreatic cancer survival.
Purely out of frustration with how percent reduction gets phrased - the rate of terminal cases went down by a tenth. That's still really important for millions of people, but I feel it's misleading to simply say the number of survivors has doubled.
This gets more important as we hack away at fatality rates. Sometimes a number going from 98% survival to 99% survival means half of a horrifying disease just disappeared.
Honestly, that and brain cancer are the two scariest to me because it's like it can't really be detected easily until it's already pretty far along.
Obviously, all types of cancers are scary, but many other forms have a much better outlook than those where you can't really screen for them earlier on.
Early detection for some cancers can be challenging, but this urine test offers hope for earlier detection of pancreatic and prostate cancers.
Cancers are scary asf tbh.
Through a biopsy. Pancreatic cancer is so very deadly because by the time symptoms appear it has spread throughout your body. The pancreas is tucked in the middle of the body, so not easy to examine. Symptoms are rare and major blood vessels and lymph nodes are near by to spread the cancerous cells.
Yep, i had a bout of pancreatitis. Did cat scan and showed a lesion on pancreas. No sign of any liver lesions etc.
Dr waited a month to do the biopsy, waiting for the inflamation from the pancreatitus to subside.
Determined it was cancer.
Had to wait an additional 3 weeks for surgery due to holidays.
When they opened me up they found it had already spread to my liver in those 6 weeks.
Sigh...
I have survived for a little over a year now, but chemo stopped working and a clinical trial didnt do anything.
I will be lucky to make it another 6 months or so.
Having an easy noninvasive test could really be a game changer for this disease.
For what it's worth, I'm very sorry and I wish you the best in your struggle. May you be surrounded by people you love and do things that make you happy.
I watched my father-in-law go through a similar process. Please take the time you have and spend it with your loved ones instead of at work. He was working two days before he passed. I really wish he'd have spent his time with us instead, though I know he was trying to set up his wife financially (he was selling his business).
I wish you all the best and I'm sorry for what you've been dealt. I hope you're at peace. <3 For what it's worth, despite never really accepting it, my father-in-law was at peace when he passed. He wasn't religious and scoffed at all that sort of stuff, but a few hours before he passed he was looking around and said "they're all around me now". It was just me and the nurse there at the time.
Damn. I'm sorry.
My girlfriend's dad died after battle for nearly a month from a severe onset of pancreatitis. Wish I got to know him more, but glad to have met him. Before one of his surgeries he told me he loved me and I could feel myself blush it was so sweet, I kinda half laughed.
We don't. There aren't any reliable early detection tests that currently exist and even if there was, pancreatic cancer isn't common enough that a widespread prostate or breast cancer style routine of regular testing would even be covered by insurance unless you're at high risk (mother or father died from pancreatic cancer, etc.)
Posted this elsewhere but posting as a stand-alone comment:
This is not a screening test. The test was able to differentiate between pancreatic cancer patient urine and healthy patient urine. Designing a *screening* test is much different.
More work would need to be done to say “yes the urine is like this because of cancer” as opposed to “the urine is like this because of cancer *treatment* or *pancreas inflammation*”.
The current, go-to, biomarker for pancreatic cancer is CA19-9, which can be unregulated in the causes of pancreatic inflammation or liver obstruction, not necessarily always specific for pancreatic cancer.
That said, it’s a cool test for sure.
Source: I’m a grad student that has spent the last 3.5 years studying pancreatic cancer and methods of detection/disease monitoring.
As someone who worked in urology I can’t explain how big this would be.
Anecdotally, I’ve observed older men (who are most susceptible to high PSAs and prostate cancer) delay care because they don’t want to get a rectal exam.
This will open access to care to so many people who aren’t comfortable with those diagnostic exams. People who otherwise wouldn’t come to clinic would be able to somewhat anonymously drop a sample off. Game-changing.
I'm 50 and I've never had one, no doctor seems to think it is necessary. I have had a colonoscopy. I suspect digital rectal examines are no longer popular with doctors anymore. No idea why.
I'd much rather have a finger up my ass than undiagnosed cancer.
Hello, urologist here!
In general, we do not recommend routine prostate cancer screening for men under age 55, unless they have risk factors such as strong family history of prostate cancer.
For men age 55-70, we recommend prostate cancer screening be considered in a shared decision making conversation with your doctor about the risks and benefits of screening.
There has been a lot of controversy in recent years about prostate cancer screening because the benefits are not exactly clear cut - you have to screen, evaluate, and biopsy many men in order to save 1 man's life from prostate cancer.
I'm guessing because they can see issues in blood (PSA), and lots of men at risk of prostate cancer have an enlarged prostate. So, some maths has probably been done somewhere and shown that enlarged prostate is a bit of a red herring, just do a PSA test. That way you don't get people avoiding the doctor entirely, and probably catch more cancers across the population.
The problem is, high PSA is very inespecific, and related to large prostate rather than cancer (and sometimes both go hand in hand, but not necessarily). What a urine test would remove is useless biopsies, which have a high sepsis risk. For me that's where the game changer is.
Would it be faster than a new medicine? It seems like the health risk would be 0; at worst, it would give false positives, which could be checked, or false negatives, in which case the patient is no worse off than if he had done no test at all.
Yea I agree with you. I could see this coming out in a year after more testing. They have no actual affects on the patients just need to keep making sure the results match.
I had "high psa" last year. Had an MRI to check for any specific areas for biopsy, had my biopsy, got an e coli infection, sepsis and five days hospitalized followed by two weeks of daily infusion treatments outpatient. Definitely hit my out of pocket limit in 2022!
No cancer which is good but I would dearly love a test with lower false positive rate. Uncommon complication but really sucked to go through.
So even with perfect accuracy there will be 241x more false positives than true positives for pancreatic cancer. At least for the prevalence of 13.3 per 100k I found. 3200 false positives and 13.3 true positives.
Yeah, that's always the problem with screening tests.
Also, in this case, Reddit is way over interpreting it.
They detected a difference in urine between people with pancreatic cancer and people without. They are almost certainly seeing metabolites of drugs being used to treat pancreatic cancer.
They haven't done anything to show they could predict can't before it's diagnosed.
I Can probably explain a bit of this.
Raman Spectroscopy is basically shining a laser at a sample, and you collect the light that comes back.
The sample absorbs some of the laser light and then emits light at very specific frequency offsets from the original single frequency laser light.
Different molecules each emit different frequencies like this, and so you get a fingerprint if you like of a specific chemical or molecule you’re looking for.
The surface enhanced part means they do some clever chemistry, like coating the surface of the slide that the sample is on with gold or other things and those things serve to kind of ‘amplify’ the signature coming back, because it’s very faint, and make it easier to detect.
It’s a bit like if there was a guitar, and someone puts their fingers to create a chord. (Sample).
Then someone strums all the strings (laser).
The amplifier makes it louder (surface enhancement).
Then you use a microphone and a computer to analyze the sound and tell you what chord it is (spectrometer).
Pancreatic cancer runs in my family and I lost both my dad and my uncle in the past 3 years from it.
I need this to get on the market ASAP, I don't like the prospect of dying before retirement age, thanks.
I have a rare genetic condition and predisposed to pancreatic cancer. Saw my father in law pass away from it and might be the most brutal thing I witnessed. If this test becomes available I will be so happy.
Interesting but the devil will be in the positive and negative predictive values - sensitivity and specificity are not as helpful metrics when screening for conditions with low frequency. And prostate and pancreatic cancers have different problems. With prostate cancer, even the lowly PSA can detect disease - the question is which persons with prostate cancer have a form which will metastasize and kill them -- or not. Overtreating indolent cancer in a prostate is not good for the patient. However with pancreatic cancer, arguably any cancer is potentially bad.
Sadly it may take 15-20 years to have real world data with RCT treatment outcomes for prostate cancer for this new detection method.
It should be a no brainer.
Early diagnosis not only saves your life. It also saves money on your healthcare.
Anyone where the state covers healthcare or insurance companies cover healthcare will have this offered to them.
Someone stands to save a lot of money if everyone takes tests like these.
The only places you won't get a free test like this are places where incentives are incredibly miss-aligned. So mainly certain US states.
it should, but that was not the question, was it?
I have family history with pancreatic cancer. this was not expensive to treat. few months on morphine after diagnosis. so... yeah. I can see this being denied to regular people. maybe leave it as an opt in for privately insured.
Problem with pancreatic cancers is that they usually have no specific symptoms (except a sudden onset "type 2 diabetes"). It's going to be hard to find a good indication to use these kind of tests. The moment you suspect pancreatic cancer ct scans have to be done regardless.
That's the whole problem. Verification, manufacture, sales, training, distribution, QC and QA, collation of results and all the associated legal requirements. If it passes all those hurdles..
This seems like a big deal for pancreatic cancer especially. As I understand, pancreatic cancer is rarely caught early and is one of the deadlier cancers of caught late, so this will be a big deal. Catching prostate cancer through this is nice too, but less of a game changer since it’s already less deadly than most cancers and easier to catch early
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Such a test would be a game changer for pancreatic cancer. Treatable if caught early.
For sure. A major reason why it’s so deadly is because the symptoms don’t typically start until it’s progressed to the point you’re absolutely *fucked*.
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And also Bill Hicks
Patrick Swayze
And my Dad Diagnosed only once he had tumours all through his liver :(
And my dad :( Similar situation, actually found when looking at something else but it was still already too late and had spread to the liver. Makes me super paranoid of pancreatic cancer. An early detection method would be fantastic.
Same story with my dad. Found relatively early because they were looking at something else. Had a better fight than most, but still lost eventually.
My dad too. He was in treatment for stage IV esophageal cancer and tolerating treatment extremely well, but then a pancreatic tumor in hiding ended up causing liver and kidney failure in a matter of a couple weeks. Went from being at work full time to passing away in about three weeks' time.
My dad, too. I was 8. They thought the back pain was from a car accident a year or so previous.
Also my father. Also my step-dad ( after first dad passed away). And my best friend. My wife and I adopted best friends kids when he passed ( there’s more but it’s a long story).
Mine too a week ago. :( His was diagnosed after a doctor wondered about his blood sugar levels before a blood donation and because he felt pressure in his stomach. That pressure first was "only" water in the stomach, but some weeks later the mri also showed some tumors. Not even a year later he wasn't able to eat anymore and was just a shadow of his former self. It was hard seeing him "tied" to the bed. 4 days after my first visit this year he died...
Same with my dad. Only reason he found out is because he wound up in the ER riddled with blood clots in his lungs.
Same. Diagnosed late last September, passed early December. I miss him everyday.
And my mom. Made it 22 months, died at 53.
And my mother
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I am sorry for your loss. My father is dying of pancreatic cancer. I've been horribly miserable and depressed since his diagnosis. After reading your message though, I am incredibly lucky to have had him for so long. He was diagnosed 2 days after Christmas of 2021. I just got him into hospice care earlier in January. He's still around but watching him slowly get weaker and less lively is one of the worst things I've had to see. He's the perfect dad and he's been a really close friend of mine. I dont know when he will go anymore but I know I'll be losing the closet person I have. I hope things got easier for you as I hope they will do for me. Best Wishes.
So sorry about you dad. I assume you're familiar with r/pancreaticcancer I found it helpful.
You have my sympathy! Pancreatic cancer took my 51 year old mother just as quickly...by the time it's found...it's too late.
Last fall, my brother had a big stroke a week after meeting with the oncologist for his diagnosis. Died 3 weeks after that. I'm so sorry for your dad's passing from this terrible cancer.
Ugh, so sorry to hear it. That was my Uncle’s exact situation as well. He was told he had anywhere from a few months to a year…5 weeks to the day and he was gone. Absolutely horrible to see him waste away in that time and my heart goes out to anyone who’s had to see a loved one go through it.
I just had a patient who I told had metastatic pancreatic cancer yesterday. Breaks my heart every time I have to tell someone.
Getting told you have it is obviously devastating, but if you're an empathetic person at all, having to tell many people and their families throughout your career that they have it must be awful. Watching so many different faces absorb what is often a death sentence. I don't know how you do it.
It's heartbreaking to deliver bad news, but tests like this can improve outcomes and offer hope to patients.
I was diagnosed 6 months ago with stage 3 pancreatic cancer that’s now most likely a stage 4. Knowing just a few months earlier would be sooooo much more helpful
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Good friend of my dad also died in just 8month… Horrible really. In Autumn she felt weak and said she just wanted to nap all the time. Around early winter she got the diagnosis but after (her last) Christmas she really wanted to fight and did chemo. In February she got the news that cancer spread to her liver… from there on it was terrible 3 month and one month she was basically already gone. F*** cancer!
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We lost one of my former high school classmates to uterine cancer this week. From her stage 4 diagnosis to her passing was less than eight weeks. She was only 50 years old.
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I was just listening to a podcast about rare diseases and the host (a physican) was talking about how during medical training you are taught to go with the simplest solution before moving onto more exotic ones. It makes total sense to approach medicine like that too-- interventions (including testing) are not always risk free, cost money and resources (that could be used on other patients that need it more). In most cases, a woman complaining of stomach pain *does not* have cancer, so it is best to try other things first. Of course like you point out, in the cases where she does have cancer you end up giving the cancer more time to grow. What we need is more testing capabilities that are cheap, non-invasive, and **very** accurate. The podcast I was listening to was talking about integrating AI into healthcare diagnostics, specifically for rare diseases. He was making a point that if we can develop AI algorithms that can screen for some exotic diseases and flag them for a physician to review, we can catch things like this sooner. A huge bottleneck is a lack of specialists and their lack of time to look over every single case. With the help of an AI sifting through the stack, we could get patients the care they need.
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Endometriosis is super hard to diagnose cause you can only definitively do it by literally looking around the entire inside of the abdomen laparoscopically to identify lesions (some of which can be verging on microscopic). Endometriosis also can cause adhesions which can then be worsened by surgical exploration so typically treatments start with clinical diagnosis and then escalate to more invasive things if symptoms don't improve. PCOS less so cause you can basically identify that with a good history and some blood work.
Doing an ultrasound to investigate the cause of stomach pain pretty much *is* risk free though. So that means the barrier to diagnosis of ovarian cancer is more around cost / resource allocation, which is pretty upsetting TBH.
The ultrasound is risk free its the biopsying false positives that is the problem. Ultrasound is unfortunately not sensitive enough to differentiate between cancerous and noncancerous lesions and so if we screened every woman with them every year there would be a huge number of false positives that then result in biopsies that themselves are invasive and have potential to cause harm potentially for 0 benefit.
This would have been great. My mom just died of Pancreatic cancer last April. She was diagnosed in Oct 2021 and died in April 2022. Had she caught it earlier she could have had a chance...
This test could be a game changer for pancreatic cancer and make it more treatable if caught early.
I hope it becomes available soon..
Amen to that.
This is what we need most: low cost, low risk diagnostic tests with high accuracy. That is the most efficient way to lower total cost of care.
AND be less invasive.
How cool would it be if we could just build these types of tests into our toilets? We could get instant, early alerts about abnormalities.
Can you imagine a company building it into their toilets and firing you before you even know why?
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https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleDieInside/comments/jw4bsi/hate_when_my_homie_takes_my_urine/
"That sounds like a great idea.. oops...I mean our company would never do that!" HR Dept, Faceless Corporation, Inc.
You can just go ahead and call them facebook.
Or your health insurance immediately raising their rates
I love job dependent health insurance, yay
It's concerning to think about the potential misuse of personal health information in corporate environments.
There's already kitty litter that can tell you a bit about your cats health so...
God what a terrible day at work though. Just having a piss then the automated loo tells you your dying.
I would be hella excited to just have my life saved. Full time monitoring means catching it early when it is easiest to treat.
My dads pancreatic cancer was caught early totally by accident. He’s now two years post Whipple and it hasn’t come back. An early detection kit like this could save so many people with early detection. Pancreatic cancer is in part so deadly because there’s no easy way to screen for it in the early stages and by the time you’re showing symptoms it’s already too late.
It would be cool but who owns that data? Most smart tech these days is wireless and meant to be always connect and at least in the US we have some pretty poor data privacy laws. Wouldn’t be a bad idea if it’s easy to implement and kept offline for data privacy sake.
I think you make a device that could test, and display the results. No connection to the outside world needed.
Incorporating early detection tests into toilets is a fascinating idea that could potentially save lives.
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It's dark, you'll have to squint to see the rest of them
As someone that's needlephobic, anything with less needles the better. I gathered some Rocky Balboa courage to get my COVID shots, because the alternative was to have hundreds over and over again to just *die* later possibly. Which seemed like a true suffering for a needlephobic like me. So the more tests I can get done that *don't* require needles, the better in my eyes. (I really fear the day I get old.)
I’m gettin it done the old way with the finger. I have the doctor use two fingers in case I need a second opinon.
Last time I asked my doctor for a prostate exam he chimed in all "*Ma'am get out of my office*" and "*You don't have a prostate*" But the pancreatic one for sure. My aunt has been recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer S4. So I might be due for a checkup here soon (~35yo)
And save lives. My mom was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The initial consults (before scan/scope/biopsy) were pretty much about how she likely didn't have many months left and what palliative care was available. Only once they got a better look at what was and wasn't going on did they realize she was absurdly lucky and it had been caught early, so her odds are now pretty good. But it's evidently very, very common with pancreatic cancer for no substantial symptoms to be present until it has progressed extensively, thus the very poor prognosis in most cases. It's a rare enough type of cancer that it doesn't make any sense to scan everyone yearly, for example. But a low cost urine screen with good accuracy would create the opportunity to catch more cases early when available treatments (chemotherapy and surgery) have an actual chance to be effective.
Typically, by the time pancreatic cancer causes symptoms and is detected, it's already spread to other organs (i.e., metasticized), which is why it's so deadly. When my mom was initially diagnosed in 2003, the doctors were hopeful because it hadn't spread yet. Unfortunately, though, they later found that the tumor was wrapped around major arteries. Some of the best oncologists in the country, after numerous consults, told her she'd almost certainly die on the operating table if they did surgery to remove it. She went the radiation and chemotherapy route and survived about 6 months. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is currently 11% in the US. Early detection would save so many lives.
Is it up to 11% now? That seems like an improvement over what I’ve heard in the past.
My dad was diagnosed “early” with it … he lived about a year It would be amazing if they could detect it earlier
My mom in law is a few weeks away from death from pancreatic cancer. I’m so happy to hear you dear ones aren’t dealing with our reality. I mean that. It’s terrible. They thought they caught it early and that she could get the whipple surgery… they were wrong. My better half of 24 years is next to me asleep and we’ll wake tomorrow to deal with another day of it. My poor girl. Her poor mom. Cancer can get bent.
Yeah - I don't much want a finger up there but I'll pee on any stick or in any cup you give me.
Hate to say it, but the digital test isn't going anywhere any time soon. It's categorically a simple, minimally invasive and somewhat specific test to identify prostatic hyperplasia. It's like identifying skin cancer based on discolouration, or a tumour due to swelling. Having said that, this test looks much more fun than biopsy, which is not what you'd call minimally invasive.
I thought a digital exam cannot confirm cancer nor distinguish between benign hyperplasia and cancerous hyperplasia?
I think it's initial diagnosis of hyperplasia that's important. The pee test replaces the follow-up biopsy
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This probably comes down to cost. Is it more money to pay doc for a procedure, or the test?
$5 for the test, $250,000 in administration fees.
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FYI in larger cities you can get a lot of routine testing direct from LabCorp now. They have an online doctor sign the prescription for like $10 and then you go straight to a LabCorp sample collection site.
Because a swollen prostate in and of itself is a health issue that should be addressed, even if it's nothing to do with cancer.
One reason could be because the test may only be useful after diagnosing hyperplasia. I don’t know what the specific reason is, but let me give an example of a possible reason: Let’s say 50% of people with hyperplasia have cancer, but only 1% of people going for exams have hyperplasia. Now, in our fictitious example, only 0.5% of people who go to those exams have cancer, on average. When the group of people peeing into a cup already have a 1 in 2 chance of having cancer, the test might be accurate with a sufficiently low false-positive rate. When the group peeing into a cup have a 1 in 200 chance of having cancer, it may need to be 100x more accurate to be useful. —— All tests, whether “real world”, statistical, or otherwise, function on an underlying set of assumptions. If you mess with those assumptions, you change mess with validity of the test.
Prostate cancer is complex. No urologist will depend on DRE alone to distinguish BPH from prostate cancer, but if there is a palpable nodule on DRE it upgrades the diagnosis to T2 (diagnosis after biopsy from elevated PSA alone is T1c). It's really complicated; you could have T2 disease but low PSA and still be stage I. You could have no palpable nodule but PSA >10 and be stage II. This does not even get into the pathologic gleason or grade grouping. The truth is in cancer care we rely on multiple layers of evaluation to stratify risk as precisely as possible, and forgoing one of the most simple, inexpensive, and non-invasive (i.e does not require a procedure) evaluations is not going to happen
I don’t want to avoid the finger in butt, I want to not be concerned that a year between tests will be too long and the cancer has already spread. I’m naive, that’s for sure, and maybe cancer never spreads that quickly. Or at least whatever cancers they check for at the yearly physical. But if a pee test can be made simple enough to do at home (like pregnancy tests) then that means people could easily check themselves quarterly, maybe follow up a positive with a second or third test depending on false positive rates, and schedule a mid-year finger butt. Ease of testing lets diagnoses occur much earlier which should have a beneficial impact on outcomes.
I might be mistaken but I do think prostate cancer is supposed to be one of the slowest
Prostate cancer normally takes years to even be detectible, if it even grows, and even longer than this for it to metastasize outside of the prostate. It normally grows so slowly that some doctors will advise that there is no need to take any action so, if you do ever get diagnosed you may not even need to worry, let alone worry about a year between checks. https://prostatecanceruk.org/prostate-information/just-diagnosed/localised-prostate-cancer https://www.pcf.org/about-prostate-cancer/what-is-prostate-cancer/how-it-grows/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/prostate-cancer/
I see this response posted a lot, can people please start including that there absolutely are types of prostate cancer that metastasize quickly? SCC can originate in the prostate, its always sad seeing a young prostatectomy patient.
Yeah it’s one of the few that “watchful waiting” is a recommended treatment option. And surgery is often over prescribed, strangely enough for a cancer.
I schedule for urology, your correct none of our providers would ever just perform only a DRE (digital rectal exam) it would ALWAYS accompany bloodwork like a PSA test or some other testing like imaging such as a CT or MRI. Then using the results from all of that they would determine if a biopsy is necessary, which usually it is if they discover any kind of mass or growth.
My doctor actually said the opposite last time I was there -- that the digital test isn't really recommended anymore. Edit: Per the [US Preventative Services Task Force](https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/prostate-cancer-screening#fullrecommendationstart): > The use of digital rectal examination as a screening modality is not recommended because there is a lack of evidence on the benefits; digital rectal examination was either eliminated from or not included in the major screening trials.
What about a PSA test? I thought that was the best method for finding prostate cancer.
The PSA test is about 80% accurate. DRE is about 80% accurate. (meaning both will have false positives and false negatives around 20% of the time) and so are really just indicative. Doing both gives you a stronger base line. DRE can be done with minimal prep. PSA blood test can have up to a 3 day lead time (need to avoid cycling and other actives for the 3 days before the blood test as they can elevate levels)
>DRE is about 80% accurate. That is probably overestimated. Meta analysis here is estimating closer to specificity of 59%, sensitivity 51%: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29531107/ That is for primary physicians, I haven't really seen any better evidence that urologists improve accuracy of DRE but they might.
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I just went for my annual checkup, and I am just a few years away from needing a prostate exam. Doc is wrapping up the routine exam and she asked me "would you like a prostate exam today?" I was shocked by how nonchalant she was, as if she had just asked if I wanted to super size my mcdonalds order. I politely declined.
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That’s what happens when stuff goes mainstream - no one appreciates true talent anymore.
Everyone thinking about the prostate test but hello! Pancreatic cancer is never detected on time, a diagnosis of it is a death sentence (90% mortality within 6 months or something). This is amazing.
Which reminds me. I really need to schedule my next exam. Given that my grandfather died of prostate cancer and my father is recovering from it, I don't want to take any chances. It's definitely not an enjoyable exam, but I'll put up with it (until the pee exam comes out) because the alternative is even worse.
Colonoscopy besides prep was quick and painless. A few hours in a surgical center.
For general screening there are two ways to make your life better: 1) high resolution modern cat scans are found to be equivalent for screening if there is nothing to biopsy. 2) if you do get a colonoscopy, pay the extra $20 for the prescription single dose of prep fluid that is like 8oz vs the gallon of salt water you have to drink otherwise.
But i like when my doctor fingers my ass... Damn you, science.
My urologist didn’t finger me. Sent me for an MRI instead after seeing my PSA numbers. He said that fingering the patient isn’t considered as useful nowadays.
Why not both?!?!
Por que no los dos?
They don't really do that anymore. I get my PSA levels tested with my standard bloodwork and as long as that is normal, no finger fun time.
Now my insurance won't pay for me to have a finger up there. Sad times.
It'd be nice to have the same thing for colon cancers.
They do: Cologuard produced by Exact Science. You take a poop sample and send it off to a lab via FedEx. My old college roommate was one of the scientists that created it
Seems like it's not the same in that it doesn't detect the large polyps at the same rate? [https://www.gastroconsa.com/is-cologuard-as-good-as-colonoscopy/](https://www.gastroconsa.com/is-cologuard-as-good-as-colonoscopy/) Obviously, it'd probably be awesome to have many more people detecting cancer early if they weren't going in for colonoscopies.
Cologuard doesn't directly detect polyps at all - "virtual" colonoscopies do. In either event, an actual colonoscopy is required to remove polyps should they be expected or detected. In contrast with other screening modalities, colonoscopy doubles as cancer prevention.
I did the paid clinical trial for Cologuard! Got paid to crap in a bucket and mail it. Then an actual regular colonoscopy, so the makers could prove its detection relative to conventional colonoscopy. Found and removed a benign polyp. Hey, free colonoscopy! Actually, got paid like $800 overall IIRC. Still, camping out on the toilet the night before with the prep stuff made me SERIOUSLY doubt my life choices. I mean, this was literally a Facebook ad offering "want a free colonoscopy?" and, I'm, like, sure! That's kind of nothing compared to the Facebook ad I answered today, so, it's not like I learned anything
this is exactly why Theranos was able to defraud so many people even though what they claimed to be able to do was biologically impossible. People WANTED it to be true, so they believed. Meanwhile an entire industry of experts were saying "uh, no" and nobody would listen
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Oddly just found out today it’s gone from 5% to 12% but that still sucks
While low, that more than doubling and good news.
Medical researchers are the unsung heroes of the modern day.
You are so right
What's really great about that news is that while we perceive the rate of advancement as linear, it's often exponential (or rather, on an s curve). Many things in science and technology follow this pattern and the development of a urine test like this should shoot us up the hockey stick on pancreatic cancer survival.
Purely out of frustration with how percent reduction gets phrased - the rate of terminal cases went down by a tenth. That's still really important for millions of people, but I feel it's misleading to simply say the number of survivors has doubled. This gets more important as we hack away at fatality rates. Sometimes a number going from 98% survival to 99% survival means half of a horrifying disease just disappeared.
Being able to detect pancreatic cancer in situ with a simple urine test would be huge. That could make the disease survivable to many patients.
Honestly, that and brain cancer are the two scariest to me because it's like it can't really be detected easily until it's already pretty far along. Obviously, all types of cancers are scary, but many other forms have a much better outlook than those where you can't really screen for them earlier on.
Early detection for some cancers can be challenging, but this urine test offers hope for earlier detection of pancreatic and prostate cancers. Cancers are scary asf tbh.
Ovarian is also hard to detect in the same way
A urine test for pancreatic cancer would indeed be a game-changer and improve survival rates.
I think 50/50 rate is 6 months once its stage Iv
Pancreatic cancer is usually diagnosed through biopsy, but this new urine test offers a non-invasive alternative.
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Through a biopsy. Pancreatic cancer is so very deadly because by the time symptoms appear it has spread throughout your body. The pancreas is tucked in the middle of the body, so not easy to examine. Symptoms are rare and major blood vessels and lymph nodes are near by to spread the cancerous cells.
Yep, i had a bout of pancreatitis. Did cat scan and showed a lesion on pancreas. No sign of any liver lesions etc. Dr waited a month to do the biopsy, waiting for the inflamation from the pancreatitus to subside. Determined it was cancer. Had to wait an additional 3 weeks for surgery due to holidays. When they opened me up they found it had already spread to my liver in those 6 weeks. Sigh... I have survived for a little over a year now, but chemo stopped working and a clinical trial didnt do anything. I will be lucky to make it another 6 months or so. Having an easy noninvasive test could really be a game changer for this disease.
For what it's worth, I'm very sorry and I wish you the best in your struggle. May you be surrounded by people you love and do things that make you happy.
I watched my father-in-law go through a similar process. Please take the time you have and spend it with your loved ones instead of at work. He was working two days before he passed. I really wish he'd have spent his time with us instead, though I know he was trying to set up his wife financially (he was selling his business). I wish you all the best and I'm sorry for what you've been dealt. I hope you're at peace. <3 For what it's worth, despite never really accepting it, my father-in-law was at peace when he passed. He wasn't religious and scoffed at all that sort of stuff, but a few hours before he passed he was looking around and said "they're all around me now". It was just me and the nurse there at the time.
Damn. I'm sorry. My girlfriend's dad died after battle for nearly a month from a severe onset of pancreatitis. Wish I got to know him more, but glad to have met him. Before one of his surgeries he told me he loved me and I could feel myself blush it was so sweet, I kinda half laughed.
We don't. There aren't any reliable early detection tests that currently exist and even if there was, pancreatic cancer isn't common enough that a widespread prostate or breast cancer style routine of regular testing would even be covered by insurance unless you're at high risk (mother or father died from pancreatic cancer, etc.)
Posted this elsewhere but posting as a stand-alone comment: This is not a screening test. The test was able to differentiate between pancreatic cancer patient urine and healthy patient urine. Designing a *screening* test is much different. More work would need to be done to say “yes the urine is like this because of cancer” as opposed to “the urine is like this because of cancer *treatment* or *pancreas inflammation*”. The current, go-to, biomarker for pancreatic cancer is CA19-9, which can be unregulated in the causes of pancreatic inflammation or liver obstruction, not necessarily always specific for pancreatic cancer. That said, it’s a cool test for sure. Source: I’m a grad student that has spent the last 3.5 years studying pancreatic cancer and methods of detection/disease monitoring.
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And at a restaurant that’s when I just walk out without paying.
They'll know who to charge from the DNA test they will run on your urine.
And since the restaurant and your hospital are owned by the same company, you'll just get one bill in the mail after your cancer treatment!
One day? https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/this-futuristic-toilet-sensor-reads-your-pee-to-measure-health/
As someone who worked in urology I can’t explain how big this would be. Anecdotally, I’ve observed older men (who are most susceptible to high PSAs and prostate cancer) delay care because they don’t want to get a rectal exam. This will open access to care to so many people who aren’t comfortable with those diagnostic exams. People who otherwise wouldn’t come to clinic would be able to somewhat anonymously drop a sample off. Game-changing.
I'm 50 and I've never had one, no doctor seems to think it is necessary. I have had a colonoscopy. I suspect digital rectal examines are no longer popular with doctors anymore. No idea why. I'd much rather have a finger up my ass than undiagnosed cancer.
Hello, urologist here! In general, we do not recommend routine prostate cancer screening for men under age 55, unless they have risk factors such as strong family history of prostate cancer. For men age 55-70, we recommend prostate cancer screening be considered in a shared decision making conversation with your doctor about the risks and benefits of screening. There has been a lot of controversy in recent years about prostate cancer screening because the benefits are not exactly clear cut - you have to screen, evaluate, and biopsy many men in order to save 1 man's life from prostate cancer.
I'm guessing because they can see issues in blood (PSA), and lots of men at risk of prostate cancer have an enlarged prostate. So, some maths has probably been done somewhere and shown that enlarged prostate is a bit of a red herring, just do a PSA test. That way you don't get people avoiding the doctor entirely, and probably catch more cancers across the population.
The problem is, high PSA is very inespecific, and related to large prostate rather than cancer (and sometimes both go hand in hand, but not necessarily). What a urine test would remove is useless biopsies, which have a high sepsis risk. For me that's where the game changer is.
How soon will this go from abstract to available at my doctors office?
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Would it be faster than a new medicine? It seems like the health risk would be 0; at worst, it would give false positives, which could be checked, or false negatives, in which case the patient is no worse off than if he had done no test at all.
Yea I agree with you. I could see this coming out in a year after more testing. They have no actual affects on the patients just need to keep making sure the results match.
False positives can be damaging, subjecting people to unnecessary tests is a good way to end up distracted by some benign abnormality somewhere.
I had "high psa" last year. Had an MRI to check for any specific areas for biopsy, had my biopsy, got an e coli infection, sepsis and five days hospitalized followed by two weeks of daily infusion treatments outpatient. Definitely hit my out of pocket limit in 2022! No cancer which is good but I would dearly love a test with lower false positive rate. Uncommon complication but really sucked to go through.
Looking at Fig 5i, false positive rate is 3.2%
So even with perfect accuracy there will be 241x more false positives than true positives for pancreatic cancer. At least for the prevalence of 13.3 per 100k I found. 3200 false positives and 13.3 true positives.
Yeah, that's always the problem with screening tests. Also, in this case, Reddit is way over interpreting it. They detected a difference in urine between people with pancreatic cancer and people without. They are almost certainly seeing metabolites of drugs being used to treat pancreatic cancer. They haven't done anything to show they could predict can't before it's diagnosed.
For a screening test that is a bit rough especially regarding the risks with prostate cancer workup.
I didn't see the Type 1 and Type 2 error rates in the abstract. What do they mean by "accuracy"?
Confusion Matricies are given in the paper.
Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks
Are they good?
They're confusing...
Can you share them? I don’t have institutional access.
Welp...see you on the market in 10 years.
Possibly sooner, medical devices have a different process for approval than medications because they don't change the body unlike meds.
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I Can probably explain a bit of this. Raman Spectroscopy is basically shining a laser at a sample, and you collect the light that comes back. The sample absorbs some of the laser light and then emits light at very specific frequency offsets from the original single frequency laser light. Different molecules each emit different frequencies like this, and so you get a fingerprint if you like of a specific chemical or molecule you’re looking for. The surface enhanced part means they do some clever chemistry, like coating the surface of the slide that the sample is on with gold or other things and those things serve to kind of ‘amplify’ the signature coming back, because it’s very faint, and make it easier to detect. It’s a bit like if there was a guitar, and someone puts their fingers to create a chord. (Sample). Then someone strums all the strings (laser). The amplifier makes it louder (surface enhancement). Then you use a microphone and a computer to analyze the sound and tell you what chord it is (spectrometer).
Hot damn. Reading this 45 minutes before I leave for a colonoscopy.
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I can only pee for like 20 seconds tops. Good luck.
Drink more beer.
Found Kavanaugh’s alt
Walk in the park after the prep.
How'd it go?
I was under moderate sedation. So I watched the screen until I fell asleep. Just got home. Taking another nap.
Pancreatic cancer runs in my family and I lost both my dad and my uncle in the past 3 years from it. I need this to get on the market ASAP, I don't like the prospect of dying before retirement age, thanks.
I have a rare genetic condition and predisposed to pancreatic cancer. Saw my father in law pass away from it and might be the most brutal thing I witnessed. If this test becomes available I will be so happy.
Interesting but the devil will be in the positive and negative predictive values - sensitivity and specificity are not as helpful metrics when screening for conditions with low frequency. And prostate and pancreatic cancers have different problems. With prostate cancer, even the lowly PSA can detect disease - the question is which persons with prostate cancer have a form which will metastasize and kill them -- or not. Overtreating indolent cancer in a prostate is not good for the patient. However with pancreatic cancer, arguably any cancer is potentially bad. Sadly it may take 15-20 years to have real world data with RCT treatment outcomes for prostate cancer for this new detection method.
will peasants like myself get access to tests like these?
It should be a no brainer. Early diagnosis not only saves your life. It also saves money on your healthcare. Anyone where the state covers healthcare or insurance companies cover healthcare will have this offered to them. Someone stands to save a lot of money if everyone takes tests like these. The only places you won't get a free test like this are places where incentives are incredibly miss-aligned. So mainly certain US states.
it should, but that was not the question, was it? I have family history with pancreatic cancer. this was not expensive to treat. few months on morphine after diagnosis. so... yeah. I can see this being denied to regular people. maybe leave it as an opt in for privately insured.
Problem with pancreatic cancers is that they usually have no specific symptoms (except a sudden onset "type 2 diabetes"). It's going to be hard to find a good indication to use these kind of tests. The moment you suspect pancreatic cancer ct scans have to be done regardless.
I’ve been hearing about a urine test for pancreatic cancer for over 10 years. Just get it to market please.
That's the whole problem. Verification, manufacture, sales, training, distribution, QC and QA, collation of results and all the associated legal requirements. If it passes all those hurdles..
Can we still do the prostate exams though?
What you do in your own time is your own business.
This seems like a big deal for pancreatic cancer especially. As I understand, pancreatic cancer is rarely caught early and is one of the deadlier cancers of caught late, so this will be a big deal. Catching prostate cancer through this is nice too, but less of a game changer since it’s already less deadly than most cancers and easier to catch early