Patients and their doctors count on cancer screening tests to save lives, and yet a number of large, controlled studies are showing disappointing results for mammography and other mass screening tests.
This month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a controversial study that cast doubt on the widely accepted benefits of colonoscopy.
The take-home lesson from these disappointing trials isn¡¯t that we should abandon early screening. It¡¯s still the best hope we have of reducing the high toll of death and suffering caused by cancer ¡ª which claims about a half a million lives a year in the U.S. alone.
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