Pharmacy Daily | “Overdiagnosis” research

Macquarie University scientists will conduct a project aiming to evaluate the cost burden of “overdiagnosis” in the Australian health system, under a Future Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council. Worth $820,156 over four years, the project Defining disease: addressing the problem of overdiagnosis is led by Professor of Clinical Ethics, Wendy Rogers. She said the aim is to develop an account of disease which will “help to guide practitioners and policy makers about which abnormalities or conditions should be labelled as disease”. The move comes amid what she said was growing international concern about asymptomatic people being diagnosed and treated for conditions which do not cause any health problems. Rogers said that the thresholds for defining diseases such as type 2 diabetes or chronic kidney disease have been falling “so that more and more people are being diagnosed. “So we get the situation in which otherwise healthy and asymptomatic people are turned into patients,” she said.

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