Principles, effectiveness and caveats in screening for cancer
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cancer screening has the potential to prevent or reduce incidence and mortality of the target disease, but may also be harmful and have unwanted side-effects. METHODS: This review explains the basic principles of cancer screening, common pitfalls in evaluation of effectiveness and harms of screening, and summarizes the evidence for effects and harms of the most commonly used cancer screening tools. RESULTS: Cancer screening has either been established or is considered for breast, lung, prostate, cervical and colorectal cancer. In contrast, screening for gastrointestinal malignancies outside the large bowel is not generally accepted, available or implemented. Oesophageal and gastric carcinoma, and hepatocellular carcinoma, may be subject to screening in certain risk populations, but currently not for population screening based on available technology. Screening for colorectal cancer and cervical cancer by endoscopy and cytology respectively can decrease incidence of the target disease, whereas screening tools for lung, prostate and breast cancer detect early-stage invasive disease and thus do not decrease disease incidence. Overdiagnosis (detection of cancers that will not have become clinically apparent in the absence of screening) is a challenge in lung, prostate and breast cancer screening. The improvement of quality of clinical practice following the introduction of cancer screening programmes is an appreciated 'side-effect', but it is important to disentangle the effect of screening on cancer incidence and mortality from that of quality improvement of clinical services. As new, powerful screening tests emerge-particularly in molecular and genetic fields, but also in radiology and other clinical diagnostics-the basic requirements for screening evaluation and implementation must be borne in mind. CONCLUSION: Cancer screening has been established for several cancer forms in Europe. The potential for incidence and mortality reduction is good, but harms do exist that need to be addressed, and communicated to the public.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it