Carl Heneghan

How can anybody keep up to date?

It is incredibly difficult, and if not getting harder in the world, with the amount of information that's published.

Added to that is a bit of fake news.

Added to that is an overwhelming number of journals that are increasing.

So it's a real difficult problem.

That's why you should listen to this podcast, because we distill it for you to some of the important stuff.

So it's interesting.

I think this concept of putting an artificial line in the sand of 3% for me creates some problems because you talk about what happens if your risk is 2.9% versus 3.1% and I think that creates an issue.

How can you interpret that small difference that you go over and above the threshold?

That means you should be tested.

So where I think this goes slightly wrong, so I like the paper, I like what they've done,

is when we talk about risk threshold, we're generally talking about we're going to offer it to the population at this risk.

Because all of the benefits come when you do it at the population level.

So if you take over 65-year-olds, there's about 20 million people you'd screen.

And if you screened them, you'd save at 3%, you'd save about 36,000.

Yeah, so on average 3%, somewhere more or less.

but you'd save about £36,000.

So the benefits of screening only come if you screen everybody because the individual benefits are small.

So if we all start talking about either side of the risk and making a decision, the question is then should we be screening at all?

Well, that's really interesting because I went, it said in the paper, it recommended the Q risk for cancer.