Topic
Cancer and oncology
How cancer screening, diagnosis, and therapy are evaluated, with benefit weighed honestly against harm.
This page collects every article by Dr. Damon Tojjar in this topic. For all topics see browse by topic, and for the source-anchored record see damontojjar.com/record.
Articles in this topic (14)
- Cancer Screening Trades Early Detection Against Overdiagnosis
Cancer screening carries a trade-off that its promotional framing rarely makes explicit. Every program that finds disease earlier also finds tumors that satisfy...
- Hereditary Cancer Risk and What BRCA Testing Can Tell You
A BRCA test result, a family-history questionnaire, and a session with a genetic counselor answer three different questions, and confusing them is the most common...
- How Cancer Staging Works and Why Stage Predicts Outcome
A stage is a compact summary of how far a cancer has traveled and how threatening it looks under the microscope. The most widely used method, the TNM system, scores...
- How CAR T Cell Therapy Works and Why It Carries Unique Risks
CAR T cell therapy takes a patient's own T cells, engineers them in a laboratory to carry a synthetic receptor aimed at a marker on cancer cells such as CD19 or...
- How Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors Work and Why Response Is Uneven
Immune checkpoint inhibitors work by removing a brake, not by adding an accelerator. Healthy tissue relies on molecular "off" switches, called checkpoints, so that...
- How MSI-High and Mismatch Repair Testing Guides Immunotherapy
MSI-High and mismatch repair deficiency describe tumors that have lost the cellular machinery for correcting DNA copying errors. When that repair system fails,...
- Why the Breast Cancer Screening Age Moved to Forty
In April 2024, the US Preventive Services Task Force finalized a recommendation that women at average risk begin biennial screening mammography at age 40, and it...
- How the Colorectal Screening Guideline Weighs Colonoscopy Against Stool Tests
The short answerThe 2021 US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation on colorectal cancer screening did two things at once. It lowered the age to...
- How the Lung Cancer Screening Guideline Was Built
The short versionIn 2021 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) gave lung cancer screening a grade B recommendation: annual low-dose computed tomography...
- Lynch Syndrome and Why Tumors Are Screened Universally
The short answerLynch syndrome is the most common inherited predisposition to colorectal and endometrial cancer, and the logic behind screening every tumor for it...
- Multi-Cancer Early Detection Blood Tests and What the Evidence Shows
The short answerMulti-cancer early detection (MCED) tests analyze cell-free DNA shed into the bloodstream, looking for methylation patterns that signal cancer and...
- What a Tumor Agnostic Cancer Approval Actually Means
The short answerA tumor-agnostic approval, also called tissue-agnostic, clears a cancer drug based on a specific molecular alteration inside the tumor rather than...
- What Tumor Mutational Burden Does and Does Not Tell You
Tumor mutational burden, usually shortened to TMB, counts the somatic mutations in a tumor and expresses them as mutations per megabase of sequenced DNA. It is a...
- Why PSA Prostate Screening Is a Shared Decision
The short answerPSA prostate screening is a shared decision because the evidence supports neither a firm yes nor a firm no. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force...