Screening for Circulating Cancer Cells

Doctors and researchers have recently announced that they have designed a test that can detect the presence of a single circulating cancer cell in the bloodstream. The problem is that no one can say for sure what it means to have a circulating cancer cell in the blood. It may mean nothing and may put a person through more cancer testing than they need.

Medical care itself plays a bigger role in people’s lives than ever before. Medical and scientific advances have made better care to offer to patients. Society in general can pay for medical care more than they used to. Economics has created an incentive for people to remain healthy in order to be functional members of the workforce.

Increased medical care has lead to increased screening and an increase in the individual’s anxiety level around getting disease. A positive screening test such as a single cancerous cell in the bloodstream can lead to a host of follow up tests, some of which are invasive and cause problems in and of itself. People who have no symptoms are convinced they have some sort of disease and this leads to stress and anxiety.

The fact of the matter is that many of us will have an isolated cancer cell in their bloodstream at some point of time or another and it doesn’t mean you have cancer. This is what our immune system is for. The immune system is designed to tag these unwanted cells for destruction and that is exactly what happens in the vast majority of cases. If you search high and low for cancer after finding an isolated cancer cell in the bloodstream, there is a greater likelihood of finding nothing than there is of finding a tumor somewhere.

The treatment of cancer is not without its risks. Radiotherapy can lead to more cancer and heart disease and chemotherapy can yield other cancers besides the one being treated. People have died from infections due to low white blood cell counts in the throes of chemotherapy.

Some doctors and other experts believe that cancer has been oversold to both the patients and the doctors who treat them. Doctors err on the side of screening patients in order to avoid litigation if they don’t properly screen people for all types of cancer.

So to screen or not to screen? There is clearly a limit on what kinds of screening tests to do and when they should be done. Screening for a single cancer cell might just be too much.