Cancer Screening Trials Rarely Tally Harms, Says Study (expert disagrees...)

 Blogger's Note/Opinion: overdiagnosis may not be one of the most important harms eg. (true) under-diagnosis/mis-diagnosis as examples

medscape

Investigators of cancer-screening interventions such as mammography and colonoscopy "seldom quantify the harms" of their efforts, according to the authors of a quantitative analysis of randomized trials.
The "most important harms" — overdiagnosis and false-positive findings — were quantified in only 7% and 4%, respectively, of the 57 cancer-screening trials reviewed, they note.
"We found that the harms were poorly reported," write the authors, led by Bruno Heleno, PhD, a fellow in the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
The results were published online September 16 in BMJ.
However, an expert in mammography screening disagrees with this conclusion — strongly.....