overdiagnosis - HealthNewsReview.org

Oct 30 2012

Were AP and AFP reporting on the same Lancet mammography paper?

… have been misleading women for the past two decades by giving too rosy a picture of the benefits,” said Karsten Jorgensen, a researcher at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen who has previously published papers on overdiagnosis. “It’s important they have at least acknowledged screening causes substantial harms,” he said, adding that countries should now re-evaluate their own programs. In the United States, a governme…
Jan 12 2011

“Simple blood test” – cancer breakthrough or nightmare?

…epidemic.…Most assume there are no downsides to looking for things to be wrong. But the truth is that early diagnosis is a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to help some, it always has a hidden side-effect: overdiagnosis, the detection of abnormalities that are not destined to ever bother people in their lifetime. Becoming a patient unnecessarily has real human costs. There’s the anxiety of being told you are somehow not …
Apr 30 2012

Analysis of two Annals papers on benefits of mammography in younger women

…use of the test. The harms associated with mammographic screening include false-positive results, false-positive biopsy results, radiation exposure, false-negative results and false reassurance, pain related to the procedure, overdiagnosis (that is, diagnosis of tumors that are of no threat), and overtreatment. False-positive results are the most common and easily quantifiable harm. On the basis of statistics specific to U.S. practice patterns, a…
Feb 10 2011

Pioneer Press publishes my call for balance in cancer screening messages

…uch promotions. Dartmouth’s Dr. Gil Welch (author of “Should I Be Tested For Cancer? Maybe Not, And Here’s Why”) wrote about mammography in a medical journal: “The question is no longer whether overdiagnosis occurs, but how often it occurs.” He included the following table to explain the tradeoffs of harms and benefits (debits and credits) – and this was for 50-year old women, for whom the evidence of …
Oct 3 2012

9-part series on over-diagnosis

Ray Moynihan, a terrific health care journalist who is now pursuing his PhD on overdiagnosis and working as a Senior Research Fellow at Bond University in Australia, kicks off the first of a nine-part series, “Over-diagnosis Epidemic” on TheConversation.edu.au website. The first part is an introduction, “Preventing over-diagnosis: how to stop harming the healthy.” Other colleagues author the subsequent parts in the serie…
Jul 20 2012

Screening tests a focus of this year’s Rocky Mountain Workshop on Evidence-Based Health Care

… My yellow highlighter stained many a page, marking quotes such as: Dr. Nortin Hadler on “risk factor fetish.” Muir Gray and Angela Raffle on “the popularity paradox” – “The greater the harm through overdiagnosis and overtreatment from screening, the more people there are who believe they owe their health, or even their life, to the programme.” Dr. Cornelia Baines: “I remain convinced that the current enthusiasm…
Jun 26 2012

Using football as bait for prostate cancer screening

…ent body on screening around, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), recently said they wanted to punt the PSA test out of the game. Or why some researchers have called the PSA test the “Poster Child for Overdiagnosis.” It might be understandable that many men who have looked closely at the stats refuse to play the PSA game knowing that the fallout can include unnecessary surgery, incontinence and impotence, all because of…
Nov 21 2012

General health checkups find lots of new problems but don’t cut morbidity/mortality

…“are that those who come [in for a checkup] tend to be the ‘worried well,’ who may bear a high risk for being diagnosed with false positives or negatives. Indeed, [the study authors] suggested that there was overdiagnosis — that routine checks tend to pick up conditions that were treated with no obvious benefit in terms of [illness] or mortality.” In his published commentary, MacAuley concluded that “policy sho…
Feb 6 2013

Five year survival rates can mislead – message to medical educators, medical journals, journalists and the public

… lives? For two reasons. The first is lead time bias. Earlier detection implies that the time of diagnosis is earlier; this alone leads to higher survival at five years evenwhen patients do not live any longer. The second is overdiagnosis. Screening detects abnormalities that meet the pathological definition of cancer but that will never progress to cause symptoms or death (non-progressive or slow growing cancers). The higher the number of overd…
Dec 3 2012

Critic calls American Psychiatric Assoc. approval of DSM-V “a sad day for psychiatry”

… stigma this will cause. 8) DSM 5 has created a slippery slope by introducing the concept of Behavioral Addictions that eventually can spread to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot. Watch out for careless overdiagnosis of internet and sex addiction and the development of lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets. 9) DSM 5 obscures the already fuzzy boundary been Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the worries of …