Cara Santamaria

And the question is, you know, should individuals continue to have colonoscopies at that point?

So I've been digging a little deeper even beyond this article, which I will kind of come back to the three points.

three treatments slash screens that they describe in the article which are colonoscopies the use of a specific type of thyroid drug and then the removal of a dermatologic condition called actinic keratosis so we'll just talk we'll briefly brush over those but i think the bigger

The bigger question is, how do we know who and when and how often to screen?

And I did some digging and I found that here in the United States, one of the most cited experts consensus opinions is published by the U.S.

Preventive Services Task Force.

And this is a task force that is focused on public health.

And they have an entire protocol where first topics are nominated and prioritized based on a lot of different criteria.

Then they draft and they finalize research plans to understand what the best available evidence is.

They do an evidence review and then they draft a recommendation statement.

And then that final review is reviewed, sorry to be redundant, by experts in their fields.

And they release a final recommendation statement.

And that has different grades, either that something is recommended or that it's recommended dependent on the patient's situation or that it's not recommended or that there's not enough evidence to make a recommendation.

Right.

And so we see that with time, trends change.

A good example would be that historically, mammograms started at 40, then they were moved to 50.

There's been some conversation about moving them back because of early on, we saw a lot of false positives in younger patients, but now we're seeing that there is an increase in detected breast cancers in younger patients.

Prostate cancer test is a great example of

PSA tests are no longer just a universal screen.

Now, routine testing is detecting a lot of slow-growing tumors in older adults that probably don't need treatment and could cause more harm than good.