Overdiagnosis: what it is and what it isn’t

Overdiagnosis is one of the most harmful and costly problems in modern healthcare.

Below are extracts from an editorial in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine (free access). Overdiagnosis (and the wider issue of ‘too much health care’) is ‘one of the most harmful and costly problems in modern healthcare.’

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Overdiagnosis: what it is and what it isn’t

John Brodersen1, Lisa M Schwartz, Carl Heneghan, Jack William O’Sullivan, Jeffrey K Aronson, Steven Woloshin

BMJ EBM 2018; Volume 23, Issue 1

‘Overdiagnosis means making people patients unnecessarily, by identifying problems that were never going to cause harm or by medicalising ordinary life experiences through expanded definitions of diseases. Overdiagnosis has two major causes: overdetection and overdefinition of disease. While the forms of overdiagnosis differ, the consequences are the same: diagnoses that ultimately cause more harm than benefit. Confusion about what constitutes overdiagnosis undermines progress to a solution. Here we aim to draw boundaries around what overdiagnosis is and to exclude what it is not…’

‘Conclusion: Overdiagnosis is one of the most harmful and costly problems in modern healthcare…’