Cancer screening, especially for people who have undergone treatment and wish to know if it is helping, is an anxiety-ridden time. For such moments, MD Anderson Cancer Center suggests people think of cancer screening as maintenance and see screens as ways to reduce the potential need for extensive care. Another recommendation: “Deep breaths or easy mindfulness exercises can help you stay in the moment and stop those ‘what if?’ questions taking over.”

What can also quell anxieties is to know that basic cancer researchers are exploring new ways to characterize how cancer settles into its microenvironment. This could help to anticipate its later moves and indicate how one might thwart cancer earlier. One side effect is the potential for less anxiety during screening. Among the approaches scientists are exploring are new ways to combine single-cell analysis and spatial transcriptomics or to infer, from two-dimensional information, three-dimensional detail of a tumor and its microenvironmen