There’s something about cancer that’s particularly damning, which is when you look at the other two chronic diseases that are huge killers, which are cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease, they increase in their severity exponentially as you age. They don’t really become a dominant source of mortality until people are in the seventh and eighth decade of life, and that’s not true for cancer. There is no other disease that always ranks in the top three cause of death for every age.

In fact, for people between the ages of 45-to-65, cancer is the leading cause of death killing more people than heart disease, liver disease and stroke combined.

Why is screening an important pillar?

Beyond prevention, early detection is the only truly effective approach for reducing mortality from cancer. Cancer that is caught earlier is easier to treat than a cancer that is caught later.

Take breast cancer – if you catch it early and it’s a local cancer and it hasn’t metastasised, the five-year survival rates are 92%. But for a metastatic cancer, the five-year survival is about 28%.

Re-thinking screening

We currently only have five recommended screening programs: breast, prostate, cervical, colon and lung(smokers). 70% of cancer-related deaths are caused by cancers not covered by current screening. 

This does not have to be the case. Hypothetically, if we screen often, we screen early and we screen aggressively, we can reduce the death rates to a close to zero as practically possible.

This is why we have introduced multiple new cutting-edge screening modalities, that can be layered on top of traditional testing to dramatically improve the chances of early detection

Circulating tumor cells (Liquid biopsy)

The Trucheck blood test is a type of liquid biopsy, aimed to detect whether or not a person has cancer somewhere in the body when there are still very few cancer cells. Liquid biopsies have been around for a number of years and have generated a lot of excitement. The test uses something called circulating tumor cells (CTCs) to detect over 70 types of cancer to an 88.0% sensitivity and determine the tumor organ of origin to a 96% accuracy. To find out more about the Trucheck Liquid Biopsy please contact us and we will be happy to assist you.