Risultati per: Indicazioni per gli screening oncologici

Annals of Internal Medicine, Ahead of Print.

Objectives
The aim of this study was to map and compare stakeholders’ perceptions of barriers towards cervical cancer screening for vulnerable women in seven European countries.

Design
In Collaborative User Boards, stakeholders were invited to participate to identify barriers towards participation in cervical cancer screening.

Setting
The study is nested in the European Union-funded project CBIG-SCREEN which aims to tackle inequity in cervical cancer screening for vulnerable women (www.cbig-screen.eu). Data collection took place in Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Portugal and Romania.

Participants
Participants represented micro-level stakeholders covering representatives of users, that is, vulnerable women, meso-level stakeholders covering healthcare professionals and social workers, and macro-level stakeholders covering programme managers and decision-makers.

Methods
Across the seven countries, 25 meetings in Collaborative User Boards with a duration of 2 hours took place between October 2021 and June 2022. The meetings were video recorded or audio recorded, transcribed and translated into English for a qualitative framework analysis.

Results
120 participants took part in the Collaborative User Boards. Context-specific barriers were related to different healthcare systems and characteristics of vulnerable populations. In Romania and Bulgaria, the lack of a continuous screening effort and lack of ways to identify eligible women were identified as barriers for all women rather than being specific for women in vulnerable situations. The participants in Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy and Portugal identified providers’ lack of cultural and social sensitivity towards vulnerable women as barriers. In all countries, vulnerable women’s fear, shame and lack of priority to preventive healthcare were identified as psychological barriers.

Conclusion
The study provides an overview of stakeholders’ perceived barriers towards vulnerable women’s cervical cancer screening participation in seven European countries. The organisation of healthcare systems and the maturity of screening programmes differ between countries, while vulnerable women’s psychological barriers had several similarities.

The Task Force now recommends biennial screening for average-risk women who are 40 to 74.

We read with interest the recent work by Haifer et al,1 which highlighted the importance of donor selection in determining the clinical efficacy of treating ulcerative colitis (UC) using faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), with one donor having 100% efficacy compared with a second donor (36% efficacy). Considering the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on FMT, updated guidance including patient selection, donor recruitment and selection, FMT procedures and stool manufacturing was provided by worldwide FMT experts in international guideline by Ianiro et al.2 The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recommended that FMT donor screening must include a questionnaire specifically addressing risk factors for colonisation with multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) and stool testing for MDROs, including extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Enterobacteriaceae, vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at minimum.3 The evolution of FMT and the introduction of essential donor screening requirements…

Screening plus explicit feedback to patients and clinicians didn’t appear to improve outcomes.

This preliminary descriptive report compares the detection rates of high-grade and low-grade prostate cancer in men invited for prostate cancer screening vs those of the control group not offered screening.

This secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial assesses whether screening for prostate-specific antigen reduces prostate cancer mortality at 15-year follow-up.

The introduction of prostate-specific antigen (PSA)–based screening for prostate cancer in the early 1990s was followed by a nearly 2-decade long decline in prostate cancer metastasis and mortality. However, clinical trial data revealed that screening was associated with substantial harms. Under the traditional clinical approach in which elevated serum PSA triggered prostate biopsy, roughly 1 in 5 screened men underwent biopsies, with more than 75% found to be negative and a majority of positive biopsies harboring low-grade, clinically insignificant cancers. Prostate biopsies are uncomfortable for patients and carry a risk of bleeding and infection requiring hospitalization. Moreover, during a previous era in which a cancer diagnosis was inexorably linked to treatment, overdiagnosis (ie, detection of indolent cancers that would not have been detected during life in the absence of screening) and overtreatment resulted in significantly reduced quality of life. In 2012, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) provided a grade D recommendation against the use of PSA screening, concluding that the benefits of PSA-based screening for prostate cancer do not outweigh the harms.