The Study
Korea's thyroid-cancer "epidemic"--screening and overdiagnosis.
This study just noticed that more people in Korea got diagnosed with thyroid cancer over time, but not more people died from it. That’s like noticing more kids got braces but not more kids had tooth pain — it doesn’t prove the braces caused anything. We just don’t know why.
Analysis score
Maximum 44 for a cross-sectional study.
Where the score came from
Doctors found way more cases of thyroid cancer in South Korea over 18 years, but the number of people dying from it stayed the same.
Where does this study sit?
Reviews of RCTs (Meta-analyses)
Max 100Randomized Trials
Max 90Reviews of Cohort Studies
Max 85Cohort Studies
Max 72Reviews of Case-Control Studies
Max 63Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional & Case Series
Max 50Expert Opinion
Max 520 / 100
Quality score
Snapshots of a population at a single point in time, or descriptions of small groups. Can identify correlations and prevalence, but cannot determine cause and effect.
Key takeaways
Summary
Based on the study abstract and findings.
- 1This suggests many people were diagnosed with cancers that would never have harmed them.
- 2Diagnoses went up 15 times; deaths stayed the same.
Score breakdown, methodology, conflicts of interest, evidence analysis & raw study data
Publication
Journal
The New England journal of medicine
Year
2014
Authors
H. Ahn, H. Kim, H. Welch
Related Content
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.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making health decisions.