All About Overdiagnosis
Q&A with epidemiologist Pam Marcus on why cancer screening can have risks.
By Sue Rochman
By Sue Rochman
The premise of cancer screening seems straightforward: Save lives by finding cancers before they start causing symptoms, when they are smaller and often easier to treat. But as scientists have learned more about how tumors grow and spread, the road from cancer screening to saving lives has taken unexpected twists and turns. Some cancers spread to other parts of the body while still small. Others are so aggressive that finding them early doesn’t change the outcome. And still other cancers might never need to be found, or treated, at all.
This doesn’t mean cancer screening has no value, says Pam Marcus, an epidemiologist with the Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. But it does mean that potential benefits must be weighed against risks. One of these risks is “overdiagnosis,” which can lead to unnecessary cancer treatment.
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