Free Republic

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is vastly over-diagnosed with many cases simply immature children who are the youngest in their class. […] Around three to seven percent of British children are believed to have ADHD, about 400,000, with many being prescribed drugs to try and improve their concentration at school. […] Now a study of nearly 400,000 children between four and 17 years old in Taiwan has shown that the percentage of youngsters diagnosed with ADHD significantly changes depending on month of birth. Where just 2.8 percent of boys born in September have the condition, the figure jumps to 4.5...

Breast cancer screenings may not lead to fewer deaths but may lead to overdiagnosis, U.S. researchers suggest. In areas of the U.S. with high levels of screening, more tumors were diagnosed—but breast cancer death rates were no lower than in areas with fewer screenings, researchers report. “The mortality results that we observed are far from definitive,” cautioned Charles Harding, the study’s lead author from Seattle, Washington. “The most dramatic finding of our study is the immediately evident—and substantial—evidence of breast cancer overdiagnosis,” he told Reuters Health in an email. …

The term “overdiagnosis” came into vogue in 2011, with the publication of best seller Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, by MDs H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa Schwartz, and Steve Woloshin. As lead author Welch explains in his introduction: “While the term sounds like it means simply ‘excessive diagnosis,’ it actually has a more precise meaning. Overdiagnosis occurs when individuals are diagnosed with conditions that will never cause symptoms or death.” Overdiagnosis matters because the health care system has no mechanism in place for distinguishing between a legitimate diagnosis and an overdiagnosis. As such, an overdiagnosed patient will...

Optimal screening frequency depends on the cancer's growth rate. If a cancer is fast growing, screening is rarely effective. If a cancer is slow growing but progressive, with a long latency and a precancerous lesion (eg, colonic polyps or cervical intraepithelial neoplasia), screening is ideal and less frequent screening (eg, 10 years for colonoscopy) may be effective. In the case of an indolent tumor, detection is potentially harmful because it can result in overtreatment. These observations provide an opportunity to refocus screening on reducing disease morbidity and mortality and lower the burden of cancer screening and treatments. In March 2012,...

Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every autistic child as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview Monday morning that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter. “My main point remains true,” Mr. Savage, whose radio audience ranks in size behind only those of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, said in an interview on Monday. “It is an overdiagnosed medical condition. In my readings, there is no definitive...