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    What America Is Getting Wrong about Cancer

    Posted Tuesday, January 27, 2009 12:58 PM | By Meghan O'Rourke
    I haven’t been on our blog much of late because I recently became one of the millions of Americans who lost someone to cancer: On Christmas Day, my mother died after a two-and-a-half year “battle,” as the locution goes, with colorectal cancer. As many of you know, cancer affects nearly all of us in one way or another. New 2008 figures from the American Cancer Society show that men have an approximately 1 in 2 chance of developing some form cancer over the course of their life (44.92 percent) and women have an approximately 1 in 3 chance (37.52 percent). One of my New Year’s resolutions involves urging everyone I know near the age of 50—including you, dear readers—to get a colonoscopy. Really. It’s not that bad. And colon cancer, unlike many other cancers, is detectable in its early stages, before it has spread to other organs and lymph nodes.

    Early detection is notoriously difficult, so I was particularly eager to read Wired’s provocative January cover story about the flaws in our “war on cancer.” It profiles a number of scientists and doctors who believe that America should spend less money on developing treatment on late-stage patients and more on developing tests to detect cancer before it metastasizes. The idea is that we can actually make headway in identifying cancer early on—though we have done a bad job of it so far. This proposition is tantalizing, and the Canary Foundation, a newish research group devoted to “the new science of early detection,” appears to be doing good work. But the piece (by Thomas Goetz) also manifested, I thought, a slightly breathless embrace of science that still seems to be iffy. To take one small example, the test for ovarian cancer Goetz mentions—measuring levels of the protein CA-125—can also be indicative of underlying conditions that have nothing to do with cancer—including endometrial cysts. This doesn’t help someone figure out whether to have reproductive- or cancer-based surgery. Now, as Goetz points out later, researchers are working on developing an ancillary test that will work with the CA-125 tumor marker to pinpoint ovarian cancer more specifically. But I wonder if any of our other science-minded bloggers read the article, and, if so, what light you might be able to shed. Should we be making a more concerted effort to develop tests for early detection rather than new treatments? Is it really an either/or option?
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