Should I always get screened if I have elevated risk?

At Catch, we believe that the status quo for cancer screening is broken. Screening should be tailored to your personal risk, rather than a set of one-size-fits-all guidelines. While many aspects of the Catch platform focus on understanding lifetime risk, the most important factor that informs our screening recommendations is your near-term risk.

An individual may have an elevated lifetime risk for a certain cancer, but the vast majority of cancers develop later in life. So while you may have a 20% lifetime risk for prostate cancer, there is a 99.8% chance that you won’t develop prostate cancer before age 50^[1]. (For more information on how incidence varies by age, check out our Catch Cancer Guides.) 

We strongly believe in the benefits of preventive screening, but screenings do have risk. Some screenings have physical risk (e.g. there is a very small chance of a bowel perforation during a colonoscopy) and screenings also carry psychological risk (e.g. the stress and anxiety that comes with a false positive result). Some screenings also involve radiation, which can create risk depending on exposure levels. Screenings can also be costly, and may lead to additional diagnostic work. That’s why we calibrate our screening recommendations based on your near-term risk.

If you see that you are above average risk for a certain cancer but you are not seeing a screening recommendation, that’s by design. It’s important to be aware of elevated risk, but we do not believe that screening is justified unless your near-term risk is significantly elevated.

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