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Comment by stonewhite | Hacker News Reader

A future iteration of this product should be a household item that you use it during your morning routine, even before brushing your teeth. Preventative measures like this should be more widely available and built into peoples everyday routines.

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Ah, we are getting ahead of ourselves. This isn't a preventative measure. It is a diagnostic device. The distinction is important because what will become increasingly apparent is we don't have good tools to deal with cancer when it is detected very early. One of the major problems is working out which of these 'detection events' is going to progress into clinically meaningful disease. We can't just take out (or even biopsy) the prostate of everyone with a hit.

At early stages you can simply blast it with chemo/radiation before it manifests into something intreatable though.

If you are certain that it is malignant cancer and not one of the other billion tumor forms that may not even spread.

Otherwise, you are exposing people to side effects of radiation and chemotherapy without them needing it.

This is called overtreatment and sought to be avoided for a reason.

Wait a second. That HEAVILY depends on the different aspects of detection here. For starters, mammography is not performed every year for women at any age. Why?

First, you need near perfect results on 1) false AND true positives and 2) false AND true negatives. Otherwise statistics will screw your results over hard. [1]

Second, the benefits need to outweigh the issues with invasive testing (taking your blood every day, 365 days, for XX years is bound to introduce some risk of infection etc...).

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/screening-tests-...

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