Photograph by MICROGEN IMAGES, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The researchers conclude that 65 percent of white women and 50 percent of white men are overdiagnosed after they compared overall mortality rates with the lifetime risk of receiving a melanoma diagnosis. The study was limited to white people, a group significantly more likely to develop the disease. When dermatologists notice moles on a patient they are uncertain about, they take a biopsy and send it to a pathologist who reviews the cells under a high-powered microscope. If the diagnosis comes back as cancer, the patient returns to the doctor to remove the entire growth and a small area around it.
“No dermatologist wants to see someone walk in and then out of their office with something that could be a melanoma they haven’t sampled,” Glusac says. “And pathologists don’t want to miss a melanoma—someone could die as a result of your mistake.”No clinical trials have been conducted to document the effectiveness of screening everyone to spot these early cancers. A panel of experts at the U.S.
“I think we should not be promoting screening for melanoma in people who have no symptoms,” he says. “There’s been this push to find these melanomas early, and this overdiagnosis is an unintended consequence of that.”
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