Latest News

In a Q&A, Ilana Richman, MD, MHS, assistant professor of medicine (general medicine), discusses why overdiagnosis is a concern, the challenges of assessing the benefit of new screening technologies, and the risks and benefits people should weigh when considering preventative screening.

Henry S. Park, MD, MPH, participates in a Q&A for Lung Cancer Awareness Month.

October was Breast Cancer Awareness month and the sudden influx of pink in our homes, on our televisions, in our workplaces, and in local businesses reminded us that we still lose far too many of our loved ones to cancer, not only in this form but in so many others. While the race to discover new diagnostics and treatments remains imperative, there is another pressing issue emerging for patients with cancer. With advances in early detection, treatment, and oncologic outcomes, many individuals diagnosed with cancer are now living longer and are thus more likely to die from or develop conditions other than cancer. Two thirds of all individuals diagnosed with cancer now live 5 years or more past diagnosis, and the number of such "long-term" survivors in the U.S. will rise from 15.5 million to 20 million by 2026. As such, there is a pressing need to encourage the shift in survivorship care away from oncologists back to primary care physicians and other non-oncologists.

Are you eligible for lung cancer screening? Earlier this week, the American Cancer Society (ACS) released updated lung cancer screening guidelines that will allow more than 5 million additional U.S. adults who smoke and formerly smoked to get screened for lung cancer. Typically, screening finds the early stage cancers while the later-stage cancers are found when people have symptoms, Daniel Boffa, MD, division chief of thoracic surgery and clinical director of the Center for Thoracic Cancers at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital told Health. “Screening works by finding dangerous cancers before they do dangerous things,” he said. “Overall people that participate in lung cancer screening reduce their chances of dying of lung cancer by 20%.”

Lung cancer takes the lives of about 127,000 people in the United States annually — nearly the same number of people who will die from colon, breast and prostate cancer combined. And yet 1 out of 5 people who smoked could have saved their life with a simple test — a low-dose CT scan — catching the cancer before it spreads to lymph nodes and other vital organs. Tragically, this simple test — one of our best weapons against one of the most dangerous cancers — is not being used frequently enough. As a result, tens of thousands of people are lost each year to a disease they could have beaten.

A genetic variant that is linked to faster progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) has been identified in a genome-wide association study.

Ilana Richman, MD, MHS, assistant professor of medicine (general internal medicine), discusses breast cancer screening for women over the age of 75.

Screening mammograms may lead many American women older than 70 to be "overdiagnosed" with breast cancer and receive unnecessary tests and treatments as a result, a new study suggests.

Breast cancer screenings past the age of 70 may be unnecessary—and even harmful—for some women, a new study suggests.1 The research, published earlier this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, raises questions about the risks of overdiagnosis and the efficacy of blanket recommendations that apply to all women in this age group. “A key message from our research is: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for older women,” Ilana Richman, MD, MHS, an internal medicine specialist and assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, and the first author of the new study, told Health.