Loading...
As dermatologists, we often ask ourselves, “Should I do a whole body skin check for melanoma on all of my patients?” The study by Breitbart and colleagues raises many important statistical and epidemiological issues that public health officials and individual clinicians must consider to determine if systematic skin cancer screening will effectively lower skin cancer mortality (the gold standard by which screening programs are judged). In this discussion, we will focus on melanoma mortality and the concept of number needed to screen, defined as the number of people that need to be screened during a given time period to prevent one melanoma-related death.
To calculate number needed to screen,1 we need to know the background risk, or prevalence…