All tests ‘(…) do harm; some do good as well, and, of these, some do more good than harm at reasonable cost.’ - Muir Gray and Angela Raffle. Medical tests are widely and increasingly marketed directly to consumers via traditional and social media. Such tests may [...]
Research suggests a high proportion of melanoma in situ (MIS) may be overdiagnosed, potentially contributing to overtreatment, patient harm and inflated costs for individuals and healthcare systems. However, Australia-wide estimates of the magnitude of melanoma overdiagnosis are potentially outdated and there has been no estimation of the [...]
The US Preventive Services Task Force has updated its recommendation for the age when all women should start mammography screening, lowering it from 50 to 40. This change immediately affects more than 20 million American women and other people assigned female at birth who are [...]
In recent years, social media have emerged as important spaces for commercial marketing of health tests, which can be used for the screening and diagnosis of otherwise generally healthy people. However, little is known about how health tests are promoted on social media, whether the [...]
Climate change threatens human health and increases demand for healthcare. Global temperature is rising in near linear relationship with increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere, bringing hotter and more extreme weather. Health consequences include direct injuries, deaths and illness, and indirect effects such as [...]
This randomised case vignette study showed that having access to a chart that graphs percentile kidney function (eGFR) by age was associated with more appropriate management review periods for the patient cases with reduced kidney function. In the case of the older woman with stable [...]
Film mammography has been replaced by digital mammography in breast screening programs globally. This led to a small increase in the rate of detection, but whether the detection of clinically important cancers increased is uncertain. We aimed to assess the impact on tumor characteristics of [...]
Prof Katy Bell on behalf of Wiser Healthcare has issued the following response to the Productivity Commission's 2024 Advances in Measuring Healthcare Productivity Research Paper. This response was written as the case-based metrics used in the Healthcare Productivity research paper may be biased due [...]
Digital mammography has replaced film mammography in breast screening programs globally, including Australia. This led to an increase in the rate of detection, but whether there was increased detection of clinically important cancers is uncertain. In this population-wide retrospective cohort study in New South Wales, [...]
Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) for breast cancer screening has been shown in international trials to increase cancer detection compared with mammography; however, results have varied across screening settings, and currently there is limited and conflicting evidence on interval cancer rates (a surrogate for screening effectiveness). [...]