Most cancer screenings don’t ultimately give someone extra time beyond their regular lifespan, according to a new review of clinical trials involving more than 2.1 million people who had six kinds of common tests for cancer.

This is trivially misreadable as “an individual with cancer who catches it early via screening doesn’t see appreciable lifespan benefits”, which is decidedly not what the analysis purports to show.

The use of “someone” makes me question whether the author of the CNN article understood the analysis in the first place. The phrase “extra time” is also particularly strange, since it’s something of a loaded term in the world of serious disease. I don’t get a cancer screening because I want “extra time”. I look to get on the early-access list for an unapproved chemo drug because I want “extra time”. The article goes on to frame the results in a way that easily could be misunderstood to be the benefits for sick patients to early detection rather than the average benefits across the entire population, sick and healthy.