That’s a good point, that it could burden the system, but why would you ever put someone on chemotherapy for the model described in the paper? It seems more like it could burden the system by increasing the number of patients doing more frequent screening. Someone has to pay for all those docter-patient and meeting hours for sure. But the benefit outweighs this cost (which in my opinion is good and cheap since it prevents future treatment at later stages that are expensive).
Biopsies are small but still invasive. There’s risk of infection or reactions to anesthesia in any surgery. If 100 million women get this test, a 5% false positive rate will mean 5 million unnecessary interventions. Not to mention the stress of being told you have cancer.
5 million unnecessary interventions means a small percentage of those people (thousands) will die or be harmed by the treatment. That’s the harm that it causes.
That’s a good point, that it could burden the system, but why would you ever put someone on chemotherapy for the model described in the paper? It seems more like it could burden the system by increasing the number of patients doing more frequent screening. Someone has to pay for all those docter-patient and meeting hours for sure. But the benefit outweighs this cost (which in my opinion is good and cheap since it prevents future treatment at later stages that are expensive).
Biopsies are small but still invasive. There’s risk of infection or reactions to anesthesia in any surgery. If 100 million women get this test, a 5% false positive rate will mean 5 million unnecessary interventions. Not to mention the stress of being told you have cancer.
5 million unnecessary interventions means a small percentage of those people (thousands) will die or be harmed by the treatment. That’s the harm that it causes.