Screening for Endometrial Cancer: Is It Effective?

Excerpt

Periodic health examinations, although advocated in Britain before the turn of the century, were first introduced to North America in 1900 (1) and were widely popularized over the next 50 years, in part by physicians associated with life insurance companies. The work of such physicians (2) was quoted, somewhat incorrectly, as proving that screening measures of various types were effective in reducing mortality (3). The assumptions underlying the use of periodic health examinations are that asymptomatic individuals may harbor occult disease, that various examinations or screening procedures can detect this disease at an earlier stage than it would otherwise be