| How to cite this article: Olugbemi O. Cancer risk assessment and cancer prevention: Promises and challenges. Ann Trop Med Public Health 2012;5:149 |
| How to cite this URL: Olugbemi O. Cancer risk assessment and cancer prevention: Promises and challenges. Ann Trop Med Public Health [serial online] 2012 [cited 2020 Aug 5];5:149. Available from: https://www.atmph.org/text.asp?2012/5/3/149/98601 |
Despite intense efforts to cure cancers through advances in staging, surgery, chemo- and radiation therapy, treatment of most advanced, symptomatic epithelial malignancies continues to be challenging, and age-adjusted cancer mortality in the United States has decreased by only 5% since 1950. The clinical course of treated cancer patients all too often culminates in relapse and death. Ironically, growing evidence also suggests that many patients with pre-malignancy or even malignancy follow benign courses and die far more often of non-cancer causes than of cancer. These paradoxical phenomena form the dilemma of early detection-under detection of life-threatening early disease and over detection of indolent early disease. Personalized medicine promises dramatic reductions in cancer mortality by identifying the patients at risk of cancer mortality and treating them before deep invasion, metastasis and death. The challenge for personalized medicine is to improve cancer risk assessment so that cancer prevention and early detection can focus on high-risk patients in whom interventions have the greatest probability of prolonging productive life expectancy.
Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None
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DOI: 10.4103/1755-6783.98601
