Test for breast cancer?
Newshub (and a lot of the British press) reported a couple of weeks ago “New blood test could detect breast cancer five years before symptoms“.
There’s a problem. Well, more than one problem.
First, the accuracy of the test is terrible. It missed the majority of cancers and falsely diagnoses about twenty percent of the normal samples as having cancer. There’s no way anyone would use a test like that.
Second, the story says “They estimate that, with a fully-funded development programme, the test might become available in the clinic in about four-to-five years.” If they had a working test, that might be true. But they don’t. So it isn’t.
And finally, all the breast cancer samples were taken from people who had already been diagnosed, so the idea that you’ll get early diagnosis this way is, at best, hopeful.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »