Practices
Health Screening Program
Screening Practice
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
An organized effort to test an asymptomatic population for early signs of a disease, such as cancer or high blood pressure, so it can be treated before it progresses. Screening programs are subject to an ongoing debate over overdiagnosis, weighing the benefit of early detection against the harm of unnecessary treatment for conditions that would never have caused symptoms.
Facts
Practice Class Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Screening asymptomatic populations for early disease is a textbook example of secondary prevention.
In Branch
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
When did organized periodic health screening of asymptomatic populations begin as an institutional practice?
Accounts differ on the founding moment: one traces organized periodic screening to the Life Extension Institute, formed in the United States in 1913; another dates its annual-examination program to 1914; still others point to individual physicians recommending periodic examinations decades earlier. No single year is treated as canonical across sources.
What would resolve this A history-of-medicine source that traces the specific institutional and professional-society record (AMA recommendations, insurance-industry practice, the Life Extension Institute's own founding documents) closely enough to fix a defensible first year, rather than a secondary account repeating an approximate date.
History of medicine, public health historyUnited States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Official Site
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.