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“The goal of screening is to find cancers early before they cause symptoms. At earlier stages, cancers are easier to treat and easier to cure. The goal is to prolong your life, preventing you from dying from a given cancer. Cancers typically have a natural progression. They start in an organ somewhere in the body. That’s the organ that they’re named after. They grow. At a certain point they’ll cause symptoms. Later on they’ll spread far away or metastasize from the organ where they started, and then eventually cause death. The goal with screening is to find them before the symptom stage. So for every cancer, doctors have figured out when screening is possible, at what age it should be done, what the appropriate screening test is, and how it should be accomplished. A screening test could be a physical exam, a blood test, a urine test, could be a DNA test. It could be an imaging study or a procedure.
Every cancer has a different type of screening test. So for example, for mammograms, doctors have figured out at what age mammogram should be done in order to detect breast cancer early. For prostate cancer, the screening test is a blood test called PSA. For colonoscopy, there’s a combination of stool testing, sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy, and virtual colonography using a CT scan. For some cancers, no screening test is possible, because the cancers progress too rapidly from when they start to cause symptoms and spreading. Examples include pancreas cancer, in ovarian cancer. There’s no recognizable screening tests for those cancers. “
