Overdiagnosis: what it is and what it isn’t

Focusing on overdiagnosis as a driver of too much medicine

“…Identifying overdiagnosis in the context of screening is more challenging, because a lesion thus identified fulfils accepted criteria for diagnosis 4. But there is no way to know whether it has been overdiagnosed.…”

“…Overdiagnosis, sometimes known as “pseudodisease,” turns people into patients unnecessarily 1234. It identifies deviations, abnormalities, risk factors, and pathologies that were never destined to cause harm (such as symptoms, disability, or death) 5.…”

Response to Brodersenet al’s ‘Overdiagnosis: what it is and what it isn’t’

“…Brodersen et al ’s recent editorial1 presents two types of overdiagnosis, but fails to acknowledge prior scholarship on this topic. We independently described these two types at the 2014 Preventing Overdiagnosis conference, followed by joint publication in 2016 2.…”

Cognitive screening instruments: How much overdiagnosis do they create?

“…Overdiagnosis appears to be an umbrella term, or an overarching category with various components, such as overdetection, overdefinition, or overselling . How these qualitative elements map on to the quantitative categories (true positives and negatives, false positives and negatives) as defined in screening test accuracy studies is not clear to me.…”

“…How these qualitative elements map on to the quantitative categories (true positives and negatives, false positives and negatives) as defined in screening test accuracy studies is not clear to me. Whilst on face value overdetection might seem to be equivalent to false positives, Brodersen et al are explicit that overdiagnosis is not a false positive result . Moreover, overdiagnosis is not misdiagnosis, the detection of which was one of the aims of defining a “likelihood to be diagnosed or misdiagnosed” metric …”