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Although physicians recommend and counsel patients about the benefits of cancer screening, do they understand and correctly interpret screening statistics? To find out, researchers surveyed a national random sample of 412 primary care physicians about the relevance of survival and mortality statistics in two hypothetical scenarios of screening tests for treatable cancer.
Nearly half of the physicians (47%) incorrectly answered that finding more cancers in screened populations versus unscreened populations proves that screening saves lives. Three quarters (76%) incorrectly answered that, if a study demonstrates that screen-detected cancers are associated with better 5-year survival rates than cancers detected because of symptoms, this proves …