PURPOSE Communicating the harms and benefits of thyroid screening is necessary to help individuals decide on whether or not to undergo thyroid cancer screening. This study was conducted to assess changes in thyroid cancer screening intention in response to receiving information about overdiagnosis and to determine factors with the greatest influence thereon. MATERIALS AND METHODS Data were ac...

OBJECTIVES Overdiagnosis, the detection through screening of a breast cancer that would never have been identified in the lifetime of the woman, is an adverse outcome of screening. We aimed to determine an estimate range for overdiagnosis of breast cancer in European mammographic service screening programmes. METHODS We conducted a literature review of observational studies that provided esti...

The risk of breast cancer (BC) overdiagnosis attributed to mammography screening is an unresolved issue, complicated by heterogeneity in the methodology of quantifying its magnitude, and both political and scientific elements surrounding interpretation of the evidence on this phenomenon. Evidence from randomized trials and also from observational studies shows that mammography screening reduces...

This article summarizes the phenomenon of cancer overdiagnosis-the diagnosis of a "cancer" that would otherwise not go on to cause symptoms or death. We describe the two prerequisites for cancer overdiagnosis to occur: the existence of a silent disease reservoir and activities leading to its detection (particularly cancer screening). We estimated the magnitude of overdiagnosis from randomized t...

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...

The aim of cancer screening is to detect asymptomatic cancers whose treatment will result in extension of life, relative to length of life absent screening. Unfortunately, cancer screening also results in overdiagnosis, the detection of cancers that, in the absence of screening, would not present symptomatically during one's lifetime. Thus, their detection and subsequent treatment is unnecessar...

BACKGROUND There has been growing interest in the overdiagnosis of breast cancer as a result of mammography screening. We report incidence rates in British Columbia before and after the initiation of population screening and provide estimates of overdiagnosis. METHODS We obtained the numbers of breast cancer diagnoses from the BC Cancer Registry and screening histories from the Screening Mamm...

The concept of overdiagnosis is a dominant topic in medical literature and discussions. In research that targets overdiagnosis, medicalisation is often presented as the societal and individual burden of unnecessary medical expansion. In this way, the focus lies on the influence of medicine on society, neglecting the possible influence of society on medicine. In this perspective, we aim to provi...

BACKGROUND Estimating overdiagnosis in cancer screening is complicated. Using observational data, estimation of the expected incidence in the screening period and taking account of lead time are two major problems. METHODS Using data from the Cancer Registry of Norway and the Norwegian Breast Cancer Screening Programme, we estimated incidence trends, using age-specific trends by year in the p...