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People are told a blood test can find fifty cancers, but not how many false alarms or how much is unknown. A short, tested decision aid before the test would make consent real.
People are told a blood test can find fifty cancers but not how many false alarms or how much is unknown, so this idea requires a standardised, regulator-approved decision aid before any multi-cancer blood test. The aid would quantify false positives, unresolved positives, overdiagnosis uncertainty and the absence of outcome evidence, since consumer marketing of MCEDs has run ahead of trials. Decision aids improve knowledge and reduce overuse in PSA screening, and MCEDs carry greater uncertainty. A 2,000-person RCT in a screening-age population would measure informed choice and uptake. Speculative in maturity, it addresses the bottlenecks Overdiagnosis and false alarms, Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency, and Misinformation and unproven therapies.
A multi-cancer blood test can be run in ordinary clinics, and most positive results can be resolved with imaging. But six in ten positives are false alarms that take months to resolve, and the test misses most cancers. Whether it reduces late-stage cancer or deaths is unknown; that requires randomised trials.
One bottleneck page and 21 idea pages on OnCo cite this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing pages listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms, Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.
Shares Overdiagnosis in cancer, Overdiagnosis and false alarms.