With the pope’s lung cancer diagnosis jumpstarting conversations about lung cancer screening, and the constant buzz surrounding multi-cancer detection tests, evidence-based evaluation of screening tests is more important than ever, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, managing editor, discussed in this episode of The Cancer Letter Podcast.
“This idea that screening is always good is probably gaining traction right now for the lack of places that can evaluate these tests,” Paul said. “If you trust FDA on this, well, FDA is not going to tell you if you're going to benefit, if you stand to benefit. NCI will tell you—if NCI has the resources to do this trial, which it should. We're not entitled to opinions on many issues, but a clinical trial is better than no clinical trial.”
Also, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is currently at risk of losing the expertise, evidence-review infrastructure, and institutional culture that has made it a trusted model for evidence-based medicine.
“Right now the task force is in the process of being destroyed,” David Ransohoff, a gastroenterologist and clinical epidemiologist in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said in a conversation with The Cancer Letter published in last week’s issue. “And if we lose the task force, we lose an important institution that was the exemplar of evidence-based medicine.”
Ransohoff predicts a “Wild West” era without evidence-based screening guidelines.
“Right now, it's not the Wild West,” Paul said. “We're still in the prairies of the Midwest and the Wild West comes a little bit later. We're in the cornfields of Iowa. The Wild West is when you cross the Mississippi.
“So, we're crossing the Mississippi.”
Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20261021-uspstf/
