Overdiagnosis and overtreatment

How to conduct research on overdiagnosis. A keynote paper from the EGPRN May 2016, Tel Aviv

Overdiagnosis is a growing problem worldwide. Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of deviations, abnormalities, risk factors, and pathologies that in themselves would never cause symptoms (this applies only to risk factors and pathology), would never lead to morbidity, and would never be the cause of death. Overdiagnosis is often misinterpreted as overutilization or overtreatment. Overutilization, o...

Overdiagnosis: An Important Issue That Demands Rigour and Precision; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”

Van Dijk and colleagues present three cases to illustrate and discuss the relationship between medicalisation and overdiagnosis. In this commentary, I consider each of the case studies in turn, and in doing so emphasise two main points. The first is that it is not possible to assess whether overdiagnosis is occurring based solely on incidence rates: it is necessary also to have data about the b...

Using Evidence to Combat Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment: Evaluating Treatments, Tests, and Disease Definitions in the Time of Too Much

While a large part of the world’s population faces the problems of underdiagnosis and undertreatment, it is apparent that a ‘‘modern epidemic’’ of overdiagnosis afflicts high-income countries [1], with tangible human and financial costs of the unnecessary management of overdiagnosed diseases [2,3]. While there is ongoing debate about how to best describe the problem, narrowly defined, overdiagn...

Screening and overdiagnosis: public health implications

Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of an abnormality that bears no substantial health hazard and no benefit for patients to be aware of. Resulting mainly from the use of increasingly sensitive screening and diagnostic tests, as well as broadened definitions of conditions requiring an intervention, overdiagnosis is a growing but still largely misunderstood public health issue. Fear of missing a diag...

Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment of Prostate Cancer and Breast Cancer Due to Screening

Achieving universal testing for malaria

Medical care of populations often treads a fine line between the differing harms of underdiagnosis and overdiagnosis. Underdiagnosis may mean that a disease is advanced by the time it is detected, increasing the risk of death, whereas overdiagnosis leads to healthy people being labelled as sick and treated with drugs that will be of no benefit and may even cause harm. How much underdiagnosis or...