About 10% of people living with myositis—a rare inflammatory disease in which the immune system attacks healthy muscle cells—also are at risk for developing cancer. Determining which patients need screening and close follow-up is difficult.
“We screen a lot of people aggressively, and possibly unnecessarily,” says rheumatologist Christopher Mecoli, M.D., M.H.S., director of research operations and physician lead for the Myositis Precision Medicine Center of Excellence. This can lead to potential harms for patients such as radiation exposure, anxiety and false-positive test results that indicate a person has cancer when they actually do not.
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