This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (8)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Oncology  • Cervical Cancer  • Women's Health  • Women's Health, Other  • Diagnosis  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

George F. Sawaya, MD

Arch Intern Med. 2004;164:243-245.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Of all medical decisions, those regarding clinician-initiated tests and treatments in asymptomatic individuals require the most thoughtful consideration: as clinicians, we are careful to "do no harm" to healthy people. Population-based preventive interventions fall in this category and include decisions about screening women older than 65 years for cervical cancer. As women age it becomes increasingly important to consider the benefits and harms that can be expected. With advancing age, the balance between benefit and harm continually changes: greater benefits and fewer harms can be expected in younger, healthy, at-risk women who have never been screened; older, infirmed women with prior normal test results and short life expectancies can expect fewer benefits and greater harms. Assessing where individual women reside at any one time on the balance provides the objective foundation of informed decision making regarding screening. Armed with the best quantitative information, clinicians can then . . . [Full Text of this Article]

From the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco. The author has no relevant financial interest in this article.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?