Many dying cancer patients still get screenings
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Cancer patients with only a few years to live often continue to get routine mammograms or blood tests for prostate cancer even though they are not likely to live long enough to benefit from them, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
Besides wasting money,
wholesale jerseys, the tests do harm, exposing patients to the extra worry of diagnosing and even treating a cancer that may never harm them, they said."Patients may be subject to unnecessary risk due to subsequent testing,
cheap jerseys from china, biopsies, and psychological distress," Camelia Sima of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.For the study, Sima's team analyzed data on people 65 or older with advanced lung, colorectal,
cheap authentic nfl jerseys, pancreatic and other cancers enrolled in Medicare,
cheap wholesale jerseys, the federal health insurance program for the elderly.They were matched with Medicare patients of the same age,
cheap jerseys, sex and race who did not have cancer to compare use of screening tests, including mammograms, Pap tests for cervical cancer, prostate-specific antigen, or PSA tests, and colonoscopies.Nearly 9 percent of women diagnosed with an incurable cancer got a mammogram and 5.8 percent got a Pap test. That compared with 22 percent of healthy patients who got a mammogram and 12.5 percent who got a Pap test.Among men with advanced cancer, 15 percent got a PSA test compared with 27.2 percent of healthy patients.Part of the problem is that some people just automatically get routine screening tests, Sima and colleagues wrote.They said electronic medical records,
cheap jerseys from china, which are being pushed by the Obama administration as a way of improving health quality and controlling costs, offer one potential solution."Electronic medical records increasingly have the sophistication to track cancer stage at diagnosis and disease status and to link this to screening reminder systems," they wrote.And Medicare could simply decide not to pay for cancer screening tests done on patients with less than two years to live, they said.Part of the problem is that sometimes doctors and cancer patients do not want to give up hope, and doctors may not tell their patients that they are not likely to benefit from having a mammogram for breast cancer because their lymphoma is so advanced, said Dr. Therese Bevers of University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved with the study.She said cancer patients who have less than 10 years to live will not benefit from these kinds of screening tests, and should be spared the added time and worry they may cause."It's not just about saving healthcare dollars. I'm just thinking about the patient. Do we need to be putting them through this if they are not going to benefit from it?" she said in a telephone interview.(Editing by Eric Beech)
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