Familial Pancreatic Cancer: To Screen or not to Screen?

Familial Pancreatic Cancer: To Screen or not to Screen?

In this issue of EBioMedicine, Pandharipande and colleagues report but at the same time represent a danger due to the inherent complicaimportant data that may well assist the decision-making process when screening families at risk for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) (Pandharipande et al., 2015). The aim of the study was to compare, using a simulation model, the effectiveness of differen...

Colorectal cancer: to screen or not to screen?

To screen or not to screen: the prostate cancer dilemma

The European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate (ERSPC) has updated their previous seminal report on prostate cancer mortality comparing screened men to controls. Now with 13 years follow-up, the rate ratio of prostate cancer mortality was 0.79 favoring the screened population. The authors concluded that there was a "substantial reduction in prostate cancer mortality attributable to tes...

To screen or not to screen.

All screenings lack efficiency because they rely too often on biaised and underpowered statistics. Healthcare business makes tremendous benefits out of well established and easy profit earning processes from screenings to treatments; therefore patients enlightened consent is under influence. In the wealthiest parts of the world, this field of public health sciences impulses studies with intense...

Depression: to screen or not to screen?

There are few more difficult diagnoses to make than depression in sick older patients in a general hospital. There is no diagnostic test and confounding physical symptoms, the sheer fact of being ill in the inhospitable and frightening environment of a hospital away from home, possibly for weeks, and still facing an uncertain recovery makes interpretation of symptoms very difficult. When does a...