Tag Archives: screening
Mammography Should Start at Age 40 Says Task Force
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 2nd May 2024The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) just released a new breast cancer mammography screening recommendation. It advised that mammography should start at age 40, though the report nowhere mentions this new start. The Task Force’s full report is appended below. Here are some direct quotations from the report which presumably contain the evidence for…
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Estimated Lifetime Gained With Cancer Screening Tests
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th November 2023The title of this piece is that of a paper published by JAMA Internal Medicine. It is available at the end of this article. If you are a long-time reader of this site, you will appreciate that I have long been skeptical about the utility of screening for cancer. This view may seem odd to…
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The USPSTF Recommends Biennial Mammograms for Women Starting at 40
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 10th May 2023The US Preventive Services Task Force has issued a new draft recommending biennial screening mammography for women ages 40 to 74 years. This recommendation has received widespread notice in the lay press. Workers in the field along with breast cancer advocates want even more (annual) screening. Everybody commenting on this recommendation seems to support it…
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Do It Yourself Screening for Kidney Disease
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 10th June 2022Chronic Kidney Disease is often asymptomatic. The commonest causes are diabetes and hypertension.There are a number of tests that clinicians use to both detect and measure the severity of impaired kidney function. Levey and colleagues examine the use of these tests in a review article in the June 2, 2022 issue of the New England…
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COVID-19: A Medical Example of How Science-Guided Policy Goes Wrong
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 10th May 2020COVID-19: A Medical Example of How Science-Guided Policy Goes Wrong is the title of an article by me published on the National Association of Scholars website. Among other topics its discusses the problem of false positives test for the virus. The issue has largely been ignored. Consider the five soccer players in Spain who have…
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Understanding the Implication of a Positive Test For COVID-19
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th March 2020The public and the press have little understanding of what a positive test for any disease means. Iceland has decided to test its entire population for COVID-19, which as can be seen from the data below is an act of well meaning folly. I’ll make this explanation as simple as I can. Any medical test…
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Prostate Cancer Screening Recommendations Change Yet Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 29th October 2019The US Preventive Services Task Force is as fickle an organization as can be found in medicine. Consider their position about prostate cancer it seems to change more often than an infant’s diaper. Their latest pronunciamento on the subject is summarized below. Their full statement is at the end of this piece. Part of the…
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AAA Screening
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 31st October 2016About 4% of men and 1% of women over the age of 65 have an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). When this aneurysm ruptures the mortality rate is about 80%. Thus it is not surprising that screening for this condition in patients (mostly men) with abdominal ultrasound has become prevalent over the last decade or so….
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The New HIV Test
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th July 2012There’s a new test for HIV which has just received FDA approval for over the counter sales. This has been widely reported in the press. Not surprisingly the press is having a lot of trouble understanding what a positive test means. The NY Times tied itself into a knot on the subject. The closest to reality I…
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Screening for Cancer
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 5th May 2012Below is the PowerPoint presentation of the talk Screening for Cancer that I gave today to Spring Cancer Conference sponsored by the Lubbock-Crosby-Garza County Medical Society. A related presentation can be found here. Screening for Cancer
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