Hacker News Reader

There are good indicators yes.

E.g. PSA (a blood value, easy to measure), if increasing very slowly over a long timeframe, is a good indicator that you may have cancer but that it is growing really slow, aka unlikely to be aggressive and to be an immediate problem. While a quick increase tells you the opposite.

Then there is DNA sequencing of cancer samples from a Biopsy. Which is evolving rapidly and should be soon cheap enough to be available at scale.

View on HN

AFAIK there is currently know way to reliably tell from DNA sequencing data whether a prostate cancer will become dangerous. That may change, but I suspect there may be some inherent stochasticity in the transition of a cancer from benign to dangerous that will make a perfect classification possible. I would guess some form of monitoring may be required for all the currently non-dangerous cancers.

Yes, I had a glimpse at current research, it’s being worked on, but it’s not yet there. Also sequencing is still too expensive for more general application.

Genotyping assays for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are relatively cheaper (I may not be up to date). In the space of 'polygenic risk score' of these genomice variants it is still a bit of debate how useful it is for screening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com