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.
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