Screening Flashcards
What is screening?
Screening is the process to detect among healthy people disorders or risk factors of which they are unaware
What are the types of screening?
- Mass
- Multiple or multiphasic
- Targeted
- Case-finding or opportunistic
What is mass screening?
Screening applied to the whole population
What is multiple/multiphasic screening?
If more than one screening procedure is applied on the same occasion, this is multiple screening
What is targeted screening?
Screening tests can be applied to a group of specific exposure, this involves targeted screening and is often used in environmental and occupational health
What is case-finding/opportunistic screening?
restricted to patients who consult a health practitioner for another purpose
What factors make a diseases appropriate for screening?
- Important health problem
- High prevalence
- Natural history understood
- Long latent period
- Early detection improves prognosis
What are the factors that can be used to evaluate a screening program?
- Reliability
- Feasibility
- Validity
- Performance
- Effectiveness
What is reliability?
the consistency of results when the screening program is repeated on the same persons under the same conditions
What are the possible causes of variation in results when repeated screening is performed?
- Biological variation
- biological variation of the actual manifestation being measured
e.g. blood pressure which varies considerably for a given individual with time and under various circumstances - Program method
- the precision of the instrument used could result in varying results
e.g. standard mercury sphygmomanometer for blood pressure - Intraobserver variability
- differences in repeated measurements from the same screener - Interobserver variability
- inconsistencies attributed to differences in the way different screeners apply or interpret the screening program results.
What determines the feasibility of a screening programe?
- acceptability
- cost effectiveness
What determines the acceptability of a screening program?
- Quick
- Easy
- Safe
- minimum discomfort
- no side effects
The acceptability of the screening program can be measured by?
- the number of persons examined
- the proportion of the target population that is screened
What is the cost effectiveness of a screening program?
The cost of the screening program includes not only the cost related to the screening procedure itself but also those arising from subsequent diagnostic procedures, follow-up and intervention among those who test positive
> cost effectiveness in
1.Screening
2. Diagnosis
3. Follow-up
4. Intervention
What determines the validity of a screening program?
- Sensitivity
- Probability to test positive among truly affected - Specificity
- Probability to test negative among truly unaffected
Note: false negative are important to avoid especially in severe conditions while those picked wrongly as positive false positive are just an alarm