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  3. Sometimes you can know too much. The aim of screening healthy people for cancer is to discover tumors when they are small and tr

Sometimes you can know too much. The aim of screening healthy people for cancer is to discover tumors when they are small and tr

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问题     Sometimes you can know too much. The aim of screening healthy people for cancer is to discover tumors when they are small and treatable. It sounds laudable and often it is. But it sometimes leads to unnecessary treatment. The body has a battery of mechanisms for stopping small tumors from becoming large ones. Treating those that would have been suppressed anyway does no good and can often be harmful.
    Take lung cancer. A report in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association, by Peter Bach of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York and his colleagues, suggests that, despite much fanfare around the use of computed tomography(CT)to detect tumors in the lungs well before they cause symptoms, the test may not reduce the risk of dying from the disease at all—indeed, it may make things worse.
    The story begins last year, when Claudia Henschke of Cornell University and her colleagues made headlines with a report that patients whose lung cancer had been diagnosed early by CT screening had excellent long-term survival prospects. Her research suggested that 88% of patients could expect to be alive ten years after their diagnosis. Dr. Bach found similar results in a separate study. In his case, 94% of patients diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer were alive four years later.
    Survival data alone, though, fail to answer a basic question: "compared with what?" People are bound to live longer after their diagnosis if that diagnosis is made earlier. Early diagnosis is of little value unless it results in a better prognosis.
    Dr. Bach, therefore, interrogated his data more thoroughly. He used statistical models based on results from studies of lung cancer that did not involve CT screening, to try to predict what would have happened to the individuals in his own study if they had not been part of that study The results were not encouraging.
    Screening did, indeed, detect more tumors. Over the course of five years, 144 cases of lung cancer were picked up in a population of 3,200, compared with a predicted number of 44. Despite these early diagnoses, though, there was no reduction in the number of people who went on to develop advanced cancer, nor a significant drop in the number who died of the disease(38, compared with a prediction of 39). Considering that early diagnosis prompted a tenfold increase in surgery aimed at removing the cancer(the predicted number of surgical interventions was 11; the actual number was 109), and that such surgery is unsafe—5% of patients die and another 20-40% suffer serious complications—the whole process seems to make things worse.
It is indicated in Paragraph 1 that______.
选项 A、seeing is not always believing
B、healthy people also should always go to hospital for a cancer screening
C、through our own physiological system can we eradicate tumors
D、screening for lung cancer, to some extent, may do more harm than good
答案D
解析 属信息推断题。选项A说法过于笼统抽象，不能简单地通过第一段的内容推断出来，故选项A错误。选项B与第一段第二句的意思相偏离，故选项B错误。文中第一段第五句只是说“自身的机制可以抑制小肿瘤长大”，并不是说可以完全消除肿瘤，故选项C错误。选项D是对第一段最后一句的表述，也是文章的主旨句，故选项D符合题意。
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