The Triage Challenge: Balancing Sensitivity and Over-Diagnosis in Modern Cervical Cancer Screening
Description: This blog addresses the clinical and ethical tension inherent in modern screening between achieving high sensitivity to catch all cases and maintaining high specificity to prevent unnecessary follow-up procedures.
Modern cervical cancer screening is highly sensitive, designed to catch virtually every woman at risk. However, this high sensitivity, particularly with HPV DNA testing, creates a clinical challenge: identifying too many cases of transient infection that the immune system would clear naturally. This phenomenon leads to over-diagnosis—referring women for unnecessary follow-up procedures like colposcopy and sometimes treatment that can carry psychological stress and clinical risks, such as adverse pregnancy outcomes.
The non-market focus of the Cervical Cancer Test Market is therefore centered on developing superior triage methods. Triage is the ethical process of filtering the large pool of HPV-positive women to identify the small subset whose infection is actively progressing toward cancer. This balance is…