Population Screening
As scientific research reveals more information about treating diseases and maintaining good health, it has become increasingly important to identify diseases in their early stages in order to treat them most effectively. Thus, researchers have developed tests for some diseases to identify people at high risk for the disease before the symptoms of the disease actually appear. These tests are routinely administered to individuals in a defined population who have no apparent symptoms of the disease being screened. This process is called population screening. A primary goal of population screening is to predict with high accuracy which individuals in this group are at significant risk of developing or transmitting a disease. Once individuals at high risk for a disease are identified, confirmatory (diagnostic) tests are then performed to detect the screened-for disease with greater certainty.
Screening Versus Diagnostic Tests
Examples of routine population screening currently used in the health care field include Pap smears for women to predict their risk for cervical cancer, mammograms for women to predict their risk for breast cancer, the PPD skin test to predict exposure to tuberculosis mycobacterium (TB) in health care workers, and the prostatic antigen screening (PSA) test for men to predict their risk for prostate cancer.
This page contains 201 words.
Population Screening article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,670 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Genetic screen Article
