Early detection

In medicine, an early detection program is a public health epidemiological program, with systematic or universal application, to detect a serious disease in a determined and asymptomatic population, with the aim of reducing the associated mortality rate.

Synonyms

• Premature diagnosis.
• Secondary prevention: Contrary to primary prevention or health promotion.
• Population screening.
• Screening.

Conditions for early diagnosis tests

Secondary prevention is based on population screenings and to apply these, some predetermined conditions defined in 1975 by Frame and Carslon must be met to justify "screening" of a pathology that are:

1. That the disease represents an important health problem with a marked effect on the quality and duration of life.
2. May the disease have a prolonged asymptomatic initial stage and its natural history is known.
3. Effective and accepted treatment by the population is available in the event of the initial stage disease.
4. A quick, safe, easy to perform screening test, with high sensitivity and specificity, high positive predictive value, and well accepted by doctors and patients.
5. That the screening test has a good cost-effectiveness ratio.
6. That early detection of the disease and its treatment in the asymptomatic period reduces global morbidity and mortality or each of them separately.

Early diagnosis in Spain

• In Spain, the entire population is given the early detection of phenylcetonuria and congenital hypothyroidism to all newborns, by means of a drop of blood obtained from the heel.
• Most of the Autonomous Communities have screening campaigns for all women of breast cancer from the age of 50, through mammography and cervix cancer from the age of 35 through uterine cytology.
• The early diagnosis of prostate cancer, through the determination of the Specific Prostatic Antigen (PSA) in blood, and colorectal cancer by means of the blood test hidden in feces is not yet fully accepted.