Cardiologists are worried that this technology that can easily be accessed by the masses could potentially increase
overdiagnosis.
While this may have clinical utility in some settings, such as assessment of background kidney parenchyma from a nephrectomy specimen for unsuspected glomerular disease, this is often a waste of resources and may significantly contribute to cancer
overdiagnosis. (2) The latter is best illustrated by 2 common scenarios.
For the avoidance of doubt here's the definition of
overdiagnosis. It's the diagnosis of a condition that, if unrecognised, wouldn't cause symptoms or harm a patient.
Teo noted the catch-22 situation, as failure to do preventive screening meant late-stage detection, but screening also caused
overdiagnosis.
If a doctor could instead examine women's breasts with his or her hands, what is known as palpation, at regular intervals, then we would avoid much of the
overdiagnosis," says Henrik StEaA[sup.1]vring.
Early detection of self-limiting cancers results in
overdiagnosis. Ultrasonographic screening of the thyroid in the young should be avoided.
But they also can harm through frequent false alarms and by spotting tumors that grow so slowly they never would have posed a threat --
overdiagnosis that means some women undergo unneeded treatment.
The main message of our paper "Medicalisation and
Overdiagnosis: what society does to Medicine" was: "instead of solely a result of medicine, medicalisation and
overdiagnosis consist of social cultural processes that take place both in and outside medicine."1 We were privileged to receive the thoughts and comments of three esteemed scholars on our perspective.2-4 Three authors approached the topic from a different angle and contributed to the discussions surrounding it.
Malignant transformation of CMN certainly should be recognized, but the morbidity of
overdiagnosis also needs to be considered.
"MORE THAN ONE-THIRD OF TUMORS FOUND ON BREAST CANCER SCREENING REPRESENT
OVERDIAGNOSIS"
An unknown percentage of these 479 cases represent
overdiagnosis, but because all untreated screen-detected cancers were visible and suspicious for malignancy at next mammographic examination, delaying the onset of screening (from age 40 to ages 45 or 50) or increasing the interval between screenings (biennial vs annual) should not reduce the frequency of
overdiagnosis.