Lead Time and Overdiagnosis
Cette étude présente une nouvelle approche pour estimer le taux de surdiagnostic associé à un programme de dépistage du cancer du sein
In this issue of the Journal, Etzioni et al. (1) suggest a novel approach to estimating overdiagnosis in breast cancer. However, there is a key assumption in their method regarding the nature of overdiagnosis that is unlikely to hold and leads to an underestimate of the overdiagnosis rate. To understand this assumption, we need to go back to basic definitions. Lead time is the time from detection of preclinical cancer by screening to detection of clinical (symptomatic) cancer in the absence of screening. An overdiagnosed cancer is a cancer detected by screening that would not have presented clinically during that person’s lifetime in the absence of screening...
Journal of the National Cancer Institute , éditorial, 2014