Cancer Screening Overview–Health Professional Version (PDQ®)

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Changes to This Summary (04/01/2016)

The PDQ cancer information summaries are reviewed regularly and updated as new information becomes available. This section describes the latest changes made to this summary as of the date above.

Cancer Screening

Updated statistics with estimated new cases and deaths for 2016 (cited American Cancer Society as reference 1).

Added text to state that an important question, which can be addressed by investigating both disease-specific and all-cause mortality endpoints, is whether screening actually saves lives; a systematic review of meta-analyses and randomized trials was performed for diseases in which mortality is a common outcome, including several cancers, to determine whether screening reduced mortality; mammography for breast cancer and sigmoidoscopy and fecal occult blood testing for colorectal cancer were the only cancer screening interventions that led to reductions in disease-specific mortality, but there was no test that led to a reduction in all-cause mortality (cited Saquib et al. as reference 33).

This summary is written and maintained by the PDQ Screening and Prevention Editorial Board, which is editorially independent of NCI. The summary reflects an independent review of the literature and does not represent a policy statement of NCI or NIH. More information about summary policies and the role of the PDQ Editorial Boards in maintaining the PDQ summaries can be found on the About This PDQ Summary and PDQ® - NCI's Comprehensive Cancer Database pages.

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