Reliable Cancer Screening Procedures Available in the Present Times

• 18 Nov 2019

Deaths resulting from ovarian cancer are steadily rising in the UK. Although it may sound devastating,doctors associated with the Medical Express Clinic – a private health check-up facility located at Harley Street in Marylebone, London say that there’s no reliable screening test for ovarian cancer.

A medical screening procedure needs to be thoroughly evaluated by experts in order to see how reliable it is.The purpose of such screenings is to identify a disease or medical condition in people, who apparently show no symptom and feel strong and healthy.

A medical screening must be applied only to the conditions that meet the following standards: 

• A well-defined and recognised treatment procedure must be available to combat the diseases that are screened out.
• The medical condition or disease must have a considerable impact on the quality of life as well as life expectancy of the individual concerned.
• The particular disease should have a time period, during which it will have no symptom. Furthermore, detection and treatment of the disease during this asymptomatic phase must yield better therapeutic result, reducing the chances of death and clearing away the illness faster.
• The number of new patients diagnosed with the disease must be large enough to even out the screening cost to a population of people.
• The screening procedure must be simple, people undergoing the procedure should feel relatively comfortable and the results should be easily interpreted to reach the right conclusion.
• Last but not least, ahealth screening test must involve a reasonable cost. It does not only regard the monetary aspect but also other aspects like evaluation of false positive tests, psychological toll on a person because of the false-positive test, medical risk involved in the test and others.

Why you may not require ovarian cancer screening?

Ovarian cancer claims thousands of lives every year. When the disease is detected early, 9 out of every 10 patients can easily survive 5 years following the diagnosis. But when the diagnosis is late, this 5-year survival rate reduces to 2.5 out of every 10 patients.

Therefore ovarian cancer screening ideally shoulddiagnose cases of ovarian cancer at the initial stages so that a patient reaps greater benefits from the treatment. Many testing procedures have been used for screening ovarian cancer but those methods failed diagnosing the cases in the initial stages.

Doctors normally rely on surgery to deal with ovarian cancer cases. Women, who undergo surgery based on a false-positive screening test result, experience serious complications resulting from the surgery. In short, in absence of proper screening for ovarian cancer, whatever procedures are presently available usually lead to more damage.

Why you may require screening for colorectal cancer?

On the other hand, colorectal cancer screening meets all the screening criteria we’ve discussed above. Usually, colorectal cancer cases develop slowly over a period of many years. Before the growth of cancerous cells, a tissue or tumour consisting of non-cancerous polyp appears on the inner lining of the rectum or colon. The polyp or tumour is a benign growth and is non-cancerous. You may or may not develop cancer from it because all such polyps do not cause cancer.

These polyps show no symptoms but when they are detected in a screening test, you get proper care and treatment to prevent the precancerous growth from turning into cancer. Thus, there’s absolutely no effect either on your health or life expectancy.

When a patient gets detected with colorectal cancer, the chances of 5-year survival for the individual usually ranges between 6 and 74 per cent and this depends on the stage of the cancer during the diagnosis. A large number of people succumb to colon cancer. There are effective screening procedures as well as treatments to beat the disease, assure doctors associated with a reliable clinic for private health check in London. When treatment is provided at the precancerous stage or even at the initial stages after developing cancer, impressive results are expected.