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NaturalWay – Margit Slimáková

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When Does Cancer Screening More Harm than Help 

The screening may not necessarily save enough lives on a population level to justify its costs. The expenses can exceed the health advantageous. For example, according to a new large study, a routine prostate-cancer’s screening does not seem to save lives or at the very least that any longevity benefit is modest and comes with a serious risk of an overdiagnosis.  

The study established that there is still no mortality difference between the screened and non-screened groups, even after the roughly 75,000 men in the study, who have been followed for 13 years. Many prostate cancers are slow-growing, which means that men may end up dying of the other causes long before the cancer becomes a threat. Current screening techniques cannot distinguish well between prostate cancers that will soon become dangerous and those that will not. As a result, many patients undergo treatment; which also carries risks, including impotence and incontinence, for a disease that may not have ever caused any symptoms had they chosen to ignore it. 

The other study following thousands of Swedish women for six years indicates that many screen-detected invasive breast cancers spontaneously regress without any treatment. The authors believe that many invasive breast cancers detected by repeated mammography screening do not persist to be detected by the screening at the end of 6 year, suggesting that the natural course of many of the screen-detected invasive breast cancers is to spontaneously regress.  

 

http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/06/when-cancer-screening-does-more-harm-than-good/

Lancet Oncol. 2011 Nov ;12(12):1118-24. Epub 2011 Oct 11. PMID: 21996169 

 

My comment

I do not deny that screening can sometimes save lives, but when it comes to screening policies for a population, public health officials must weigh the medical and economic costs and benefits across people of different risk levels. During the last tens of years there were millions of money invested into the development of screening methods, tests and testing medical equipment. At the same time there are still only minimum investments going into real natural prevention of diseases as healthy nutrition, which has no side effects at all.