Introduction
A few saying that we had been hearing for years and years about the health and its benefits are ‘health is wealth’ and that ‘prevention is better than cure’. These saying have proved to be more than 100% true and once a person loses their health, they come to know how wealthy he was when he was healthy. The later saying is as important as the former one because if you want to stay healthy you must try to prevent all the diseases from attacking you rather than first getting attacked by the disease and then realizing the need of the cure and rushing to the doctors. The diseases can easily be avoided by adopting a few habits that are helpful in the elimination of disease and keeping you healthy. These include special care for personal hygiene, taking nutritious and healthy diet, making exercise a daily practice and above all consulting a doctor. The regular checks the doctors make in order to learn if there is any disease in the person are really helpful and the test that is used to detect the presence of cancer is called cancer screening.
History
If we get more specific about the definition of cancer screening than we can say that the test made to identify the presence of cancer in the people who do not show any signs or symptoms of cancer is called cancer screening. These screening tests prove to be very helpful for the doctors in order to first identify the disease and then to cure it. It is always a good approach for the doctors to perform the cancer screening tests on the patients who get to them for getting their regular medical checkups. On the other hand it must be noted that the cancer screening tests are not meant to detect every type of cancer rather they are for most commonly occurring cancers. These include majorly the breast cancer, cervical cancer and colon and rectal cancer. The other types of cancer that do not fall in the category of getting diagnosed by cancer screening are analyzed using several other techniques and medical tests.
Features
There are a number of tests that are performed in order to determine whether a person has or does not have any form of cancer in their body. These tests include a physical test, a laboratory test, test based on some imaging procedures and some genetic tests to validate the knowledge of culmination of cancer. In the physical test for cancer screening a thorough medical exam of the person’s body is taken and all the previous medical diseases are revisited. Then a series of laboratory tests is taken that include blood tests and urine tests etc. The imaging tests for cancer screening are meant to show the pictures of the internal parts of the body that depict the sites for cancer if any. The genetic tests are performed on the DNA to determine the nature of the genes that were passed from the parents to the child.
Tips and comments
Like every other treatment for cancer, these screening tests also have some risks involved with them that can be eliminated if we know about the risk factors for which you must take proper knowledge before you proceed for the cancer screening.
