Costs, Benefits and Overtreatment

Recently, a panel of medical experts determined that tests commonly recommended to screen healthy women for ovarian cancer do more harm than good and should not be performed. The screenings do not lower the death rate from the disease, and they yield many false-positive results that lead to unnecessary operations with high complication rates. In sum, they found that there is no existing method of screening for ovarian cancer that is effective in reducing deaths.

The recommendations are just the latest in a series of challenges to cancer screenings issued by the panel of 16 experts, which has also rejected P.S.A. screening for prostate cancer in men and routine mammograms in women under 50.