Why more people are being told they have thyroid cancer — but not dying from it
Korea's thyroid-cancer "epidemic"--screening and overdiagnosis.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
Thyroid cancer diagnoses increased 15-fold while mortality stayed flat.
It contradicts the widely held belief that increased screening leads to reduced deaths — here, screening exploded but deaths didn’t budge, implying many detected tumors are harmless.
Practical Takeaways
Consider discussing with your doctor whether thyroid screening is necessary for you — especially if you have no symptoms or risk factors.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Surprising Findings
Thyroid cancer diagnoses increased 15-fold while mortality stayed flat.
It contradicts the widely held belief that increased screening leads to reduced deaths — here, screening exploded but deaths didn’t budge, implying many detected tumors are harmless.
Practical Takeaways
Consider discussing with your doctor whether thyroid screening is necessary for you — especially if you have no symptoms or risk factors.
Publication
Journal
The New England journal of medicine
Year
2014
Authors
H. Ahn, H. Kim, H. Welch
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Claims (3)
Finding and treating very slow-growing cancers through aggressive screening doesn’t help people live longer overall — it just finds cancers that wouldn’t have hurt them anyway.
Getting everyone screened for thyroid cancer finds a lot of harmless lumps that would never hurt you, so more people are told they have cancer—but it doesn’t save any lives.
In South Korea, doctors started finding a lot more cases of thyroid cancer between 1993 and 2011—15 times more—but surprisingly, the number of people dying from it didn’t go up at all.