alt Hacker News>"Risks? The risks of a colonoscopy are crazy low though."
Not at the statistical level. Death rate from complications is about 1 in 10,000: https://www.endoscopy-campus.com/ec-news/risk-of-death-from-...
>"Risks? The risks of a colonoscopy are crazy low though."
Not at the statistical level. Death rate from complications is about 1 in 10,000: https://www.endoscopy-campus.com/ec-news/risk-of-death-from-...
The risk of serious complications like major bleeding or perforation is closer to 40-80 per 10,000, significantly higher than the roughly 3-5 per 10,000 annual chance of actually having colorectal cancer for low-risk groups.
My doctor says that since Cologuard catches a large percentage of those 3-5 per 10,000 without any of the colonoscopy risk, the marginal benefits from colonoscopy really aren't justified since FIT+DNA testing is almost as good, at least for low-risk cohorts.
Very few things in medicine are zero risk. I wish more doctors would help balance the risk of doing A vs. the risk of doing B vs. the risk of doing nothing.
It's all Bayesian conditional probabilities, considering your own individual risk factors, and considering the false positive rate and false negative rate of each test.