Talking About Stopping Cancer Screening-Not So Easy

摘要

As the population ages, increasingly older adults are screened for cancer, including those with short life expectancies. The benefit of cancer screening is finding cancer early before it spreads and requires aggressive therapy and/or leads to loss of life. Because some older adults may not live long enough for a screen-detectable cancer to become clinically significant, the benefits of screening in older adults, particularly those in poor health, are not established. Meanwhile, harms of cancer screening are immediate and include pain and anxiety related to the screening test, complications of the screening test (eg, bowel perforation from colonoscopy) or additional tests after a false-positive result, and overdiagnosis (finding tumors that would never cause symptoms in an older adult's lifetime).