Medicine: Mind the Gap Seminar

3-Part Series on Disease Prevention Screening
Series Topic #3:
Overdiagnosis in Cancer Screening: Overcoming Challenges, Avoiding Mistakes

Presented by Ruth B. Etzioni, Ph.D.
Chair, Scientific Steering Committee
Hutch Data Commonwealth
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

The problem of overdiagnosis, the detection by screening of latent cancers that would never have surfaced, has been much in the news lately. What is overdiagnosis, and how significant is the problem? In this presentation, Dr. Etzioni will examine how overdiagnosis arises and will discuss what it takes to validly estimate its frequency. Different types of study designs and estimation methods have been used, but many of these probably yield biased results. Consumers of overdiagnosis studies need to carefully navigate the published literature to properly understand the extent of the problem. Dr. Etzioni will provide a guide using examples from breast and prostate cancer screening to identify the types of studies that are most likely to produce reliable results.

Dr. Etzioni is a biostatistician and full member in the Division of Public Health Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Her research program focuses on the development of innovative statistical and computer models to learn about the latent process of cancer progression from observed data on disease incidence and mortality. This knowledge is applied to fill in the evidence gaps that inevitably arise when developing policies for cancer detection and management.

Dr. Etzioni will accept questions about her presentation via email at prevention@mail.nih.gov
and on Twitter with #NIHMtG.

For more information go to https://prevention.nih.gov/programs-events/medicine-mind-the-gap/seminars/defining-measuring-overdiagnosis

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