April has been declared National Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Month and I plan to highlight many topics related to cancer risk reduction (I don’t like the term prevention as you can’t prevent cancer) and early detection and screening.

I have been getting a lot of questions about the Galleri Test which is a multi cancer early detection test that looks for a “cancer specific signal” in the 🩸blood (testing cell free DNA for changes commonly seen in cancer cells but not in regular cells).

It aims to detect a signal in more than 50 cancer types, many of which don’t have routine cancer screening tests.

📌 A positive signal would prompt work up through diagnostic imaging and other tests for a cancer but this test has false positives (meaning positive result but no actual cancer diagnosed) and false negatives (negative result but cancer diagnosed).

📌 I go through the data from the PATHFINDER Study published in @thelancetgroup. 92 patients out of 6621 patients ages 50 and over (prior cancer allowed as long as definitive treatment completed greater than 3 years prior to enrollment.
➡️ Patients could have been on endocrine therapy for breast cancer) had a positive test (meaning a positive signal) and out of those, 35 were subsequently diagnosed with cancer (most cancers diagnosed of the 35 do not have available screening tests) and 57 were not (within 12 months from test).

➡️ Out of the 6529 that had a negative test, 86 actually were subsequently diagnosed with cancer.

🚨 The test is not yet FDA approved, must be ordered by a physician and costs $949 💸 and we don’t know how often to do it and when. The false positives and negatives are important to keep in mind!

🧐 My take…intriguing, promising but not ready for real time use yet.

⁉️ What do you think? Let me know your questions!

#cancerdoctor #cancerprevention #cancerdetection #galleritest #cancerscreening #oncologist