Screening, in medicine, is a strategy used to look for as-yet-unrecognised conditions or risk markers. This testing can be applied to individuals or to a whole population. The people tested may not exhibit any signs or symptoms of a disease, or they might exhibit only one or two symptoms, which by themselves do not indicate a definitive diagnosis.

Screening interventions are designed to identify conditions which could at some future point turn into disease, thus enabling earlier intervention and management in the hope to reduce mortality and suffering from a disease. Although screening may lead to an earlier diagnosis, not all screening tests have been shown to benefit the person being screened; over diagnosis, misdiagnosis, and creating a false sense of security are some potential adverse effects of screening. Additionally, some screening tests can be inappropriately overused. For these reasons, a test used in a screening program, especially for a disease with low incidence, must have good sensitivity in addition to acceptable specificity.

Several types of screening exist: universal screening involves screening of all individuals in a certain category. Screening interventions are not designed to be diagnostic, and often have significant rates of both false positive and false negative results. Frequently updated recommendations for screening are provided by the independent panel of experts, the United States Preventive Services Task Force.

Screening may identify abnormalities that would never cause a problem in a person's lifetime. An example of this is prostate cancer screening; it has been said that "more men die with prostate cancer than of it". Autopsy studies have shown that between 14 and 77% of elderly men who have died of other causes are found to have had prostate cancer.

Aside from issues with unnecessary treatment (prostate cancer treatment is by no means without risk), over diagnosis makes a study look good at picking up abnormalities, even though they are sometimes harmless.

Over diagnosis occurs when all of these people with harmless abnormalities are counted as "lives saved" by the screening, rather than as "healthy people needlessly harmed by over diagnosis".

Journal of Imaging and Interventional Radiology is the peer-reviewed journal of choice for interventional radiologists, radiologists, cardiologists, vascular surgeons, neurosurgeons, and other clinicians who seek current and reliable information on every aspect of interventional radiology.
Each issue in Journal of Imaging and Interventional Radiology covers critical and cutting-edge medical minimally invasive, clinical, basic research, radiological, pathological, and socioeconomic issues of importance to the field. The journal is a medium for original articles, reviews, pictorial essays, technical notes and case reports related to all fields of interventional radiology.

https://www.imedpub.com/submissions/imaging-interventional-radiology.html or an attachment to mail: radiology@emedscholar.com

Best wishes

Ann Jose

Journal coordinator

Journal of Imaging and Interventional Radiology

intervradiology@longdomjournal.org