musings of a salt whisperer
It feels like if a patient coughs they get a CT angiogram to rule-out pulmonary embolism. How many patients would defere that test if they had to sign off on the following chart:
There is some great stuff in there. This line on the futility of cancer screening among dializers struck me as particularly interesting:
[Kajbaf et al.] calculated the maximum increase in life expectancy (for a 60-yr-old woman) from routine Papanicolaou (Pap) testing and mammography to be 3 and 2 days, respectively.
Wow. (Ref PDF)
I feel like dialysis is always geting beat up over the high yearly mortality rate, and admittedly it is high. So it was interesting to see this table of some other conditions and there associated mortality. I didn’t realize dialysis had such familiar company.
The New York Times has good coverage of the latest data (US Study, European study) on prostate cancer.
[After discussing the 20% reduction in mortality found in the European study] But in terms of individual risk, even that is not a huge benefit. It means that a man who isn’t screened has about a 3 percent average risk of dying from prostate cancer. If that man undergoes annual P.S.A. screenings, his risk drops to about 2.4 percent.
And there is an important tradeoff. P.S.A. testing increases a man’s risk of being treated for a cancer that would never have harmed him in the first place. The European study found that for every man who was helped by P.S.A. screening, at least 48 received unnecessary treatment that increased risk for impotency and incontinence. Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, summed up the European data this way: “The test is about 50 times more likely to ruin your life than it is to save your life.”