Festival of Science: The sixth sense of the oncologist. How doctors can find cancer earlier and why you may not necessarily want to know.

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• organized by Gianmarco Contino, VHI, St EdmundCollege
• Thursday 15 March 2018, 18:00-19:30
• Garden Room, St Edmund's College, Mount Pleasant, CB3 0BN.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Gianmarco Contino.

Everybody is welcome

How far in advance can we detect cancer and how useful is early diagnosis? Join a panel of experts to discuss the exciting opportunities and hidden challenges of early cancer detection.

For the majority of cancer patients, a diagnosis is made after symptoms become clinically apparent. By that time cancer is often at an advanced stage and treatments usually involve some combination of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. These treatments are gruelling and survival rates are highly variable depending on the type of cancer and the stage at which it is detected. Cancer develops slowly over several years through an evolutionary process in which cells with a fitness advantage survive and can become dominant, rather akin to Darwin’s theories for population genetics. Early detection of cancer aims to identify pre-cancerous changes in a tissue at risk of evolving into an invasive cancer. The rationale for deploying tests in search of pre-cancerous changes is that treatment at an early stage is likely to offer higher chances of cure than when cancer is detected at an advanced stage. Accurate predictions about the natural history of a lesion is therefore at the core of early detection of cancer; this is increasingly possible as the result of the improved epidemiological, clinical and molecular information available which can be linked to cancer statistics for hundreds of thousands of patients. In addition to NHS led healthcare programmes, we also live in a world in which there is increasing interest in the individual taking ownership of their health outcomes. There are opportunities to self-prescribe screening tests and undergo healthcare checks without a full understanding of the significance and implications of what a positive or negative result might imply. A panel of experts will guide you in trying to answer some of the important questions arising from the rapid evolution of early cancer detection: How likely is that early cancer to become a clinically relevant problem during my lifespan? And how does that risk compare to other healthcare problems? If I am found to be at risk of cancer does it mean I am now a sick person or am I still a healthy individual? What level of false positive or negative test results is acceptable? How can we weigh up the side-effects of preventative testing on a large-scale healthy population versus the poorer outcomes advanced cancer on a per individual basis? How does screening stack up with inequality in healthcare systems? Please join us in the scenic Garden Room of St Edmund College for a debate on the many factors that contribute to the definition of harm benefit balance of early detection of cancer at the individual and societal level.

This talk is part of the gc502's list series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Garden Room, St Edmund's College, Mount Pleasant, CB3 0BN

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.