SICKNESS -*ARRIVAL*- SIGNALS

ONE of the sobering facts about cancer treatment is that it often begins when it is already too late : Studies show that an alarming number of treatable cancers  are  diagnosed in advanced stages of disease.

That has long bothered Dr. Sam Gambhir, a top cancer researcher at Stanford University    who lost his teenager son to brain cancer in 2015. Dr. Gambhir wondered if there were some  surefire  way to detect cancer long before people got sick.

''In the cancer field we often find problems long after people have symptoms,'' he said. ''We rarely find them early.''

Now Dr. Gambhiris leading a large study that seeks to better understand the transition from normal health to disease. 

The study called  Project Baseline, could lead to an identification of new markers in the blood, stool or urine of healthy people that help predict cancer, cardiovascular disease and other leading killers.

It is a joint effort between   Stanford and Duke Universities and  Verily, a  life science company owned by Alphabet, the parent company of  Google.

Researchers are recruiting  10,000  adults  across the United States who will be examined in extreme detail and followed intensively for at least four years.

Many of these people joining the study are healthy adults, which differ from traditional medical trials that focus largely on people who are already ill.

Another  key difference is that researchers are collecting a  staggering amount of   medical data on their subjects : analyzing their microblomes, sequencing their genomes, subjecting them to a variety of scans and assessing their cognitive health.

They are also equipping volunteers with new  wearable technology from  Verily  that records  that records their nightly sleep patterns and tracks their heart rhythms and physical activity.

In another unusual move, the  Project Baseline investigators are sharing the  research results  with their subjects, from how much plaque or calcium they find in their arteries to which bacterial strains inhabit their guts. 

Some experts worry, however, that providing such detailed medical data to healthy adults could lead to new problems.

Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of genomics st the Scripps Research Institute  in California, cautioned that the sheer amount of testing, scans and other ''deep interrogations''  could produce incidental findings that cause unnecessary anxiety.

 ''Sometimes it leads to understand further testing even be harmful,'' he said.

The honor and serving of the latest  global operational research on latest developments in Health Research issues continues. The World Students Society thanks author and researcher Anahad O' Connor.