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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Friday, February 28, 2014

Another cancer diagnosis not to worry about

Posted on February 21, 2014 by admin
We have repeatedly discussed the problem of over-diagnosis and the consequences: treatment of cancers that would not harm the person in which they are found — some breast and prostate cancers definitely fall into this category. A new study just published in JAMA Otolaryngology now extends this finding to thyroid cancer…..They examined the data on thyroid cancer incidence, type, tumor size and mortality, and found that the incidence (new cases) of thyroid cancer nearly tripled (from 4.9 to 14.3 cases per 100,000 persons) between those dates. While that certainly sounds like a frightening statistic, the authors also found that most of this increase was due to an increase in papillary thyroid cancer — a type that is not deadly. Further, many of the tumors were too small to ever become life-threatening. In addition, they found that the mortality rate from thyroid cancer had not increased between 1975 and 2009, which also suggests that the increased incidence was not due to deadly forms of the disease.
In their discussion, the authors note that the apparent epidemic of thyroid cancer in the United States does not “seem to be an epidemic of disease.” Instead, their data indicate that the problem is over-diagnosis. They suggest dealing with it by giving patients the option of active surveillance, and/or relabeling incidentally identified small thyroid lesions as something other than cancer.……To Read More…

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