Terminal Cancer Patients Too Often Get Routine Cancer Screenings - Study

Article preview from "The Gray Sheet" - October 13, 2010

Patients with advanced-stage cancer are too often undergoing unnecessary cancer screenings, oncologists conclude in a study in the Oct. 13 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Terminal Cancer Patients Too Often Get Routine Cancer Screenings - Study

Article preview from "The Gray Sheet" - October 13, 2010

Efforts should be taken to reduce screening rates in this population to remove waste from the Medicare system, the team from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute assert.

In particular, the researchers looked at rates of mammograms, Papanicolaou testing, prostate specific antigen screening and colonoscopy/sigmoidoscopy in patients with cancers associated with a median survival of less than two years.

Based on an analysis of a matched registry cohort of about 87,000 Medicare patients diagnosed with advanced cancer from 1998 to 2005 and about 87,000 cancer-free Medicare patients during the same period, the team identified screening rates in advanced disease patients that were 35% to 55% of the rates observed in cancer-free patients.

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