I. Summary The benefit of breast cancer (BC) screening with mammography has been demonstrated by randomized controlled trials (RCTs). However, there is a growing concern about the harms of screening, in particular the problem of overdiagnosis. It occurs when screening detects a breast cancer that would not have presented clinically in the woman's lifetime in the absence of screening. Overdiagno...

OBJECTIVES (1) To explain general practitioners' (GPs') approaches to prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing and overdiagnosis; (2) to explain how GPs reason about their PSA testing routines and (3) to explain how these routines influence GPs' personal experience as clinicians. SETTING Primary care practices in Australia including men's health clinics and rural practices with variable access...

Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of an abnormality that is not associated with a substantial health hazard and that patients have no benefit to be aware of. It is neither a misdiagnosis (diagnostic error), nor a false positive result (positive test in the absence of a real abnormality). It mainly results from screening, use of increasingly sensitive diagnostic tests, incidental findings on routin...

Objective To quantify the magnitude of overdiagnosis from non-progressive disease detected by screening mammography, after adjustment for the potential for lead time bias, secular trend in the underlying risk of breast cancer, and opportunistic screening. Design Approximate bayesian computation analysis with a stochastic simulation model designed to replicate standardised incidence rates of bre...

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...

BACKGROUND Overdiagnosis of clinically insignificant prostate cancer is considered a major potential drawback of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening. Quantitative estimates of the magnitude of this problem are, however, lacking. We estimated rates of prostate cancer overdiagnosis due to PSA testing that are consistent with the observed incidence of prostate cancer in the United States fro...