Part II: Basic approach to health screening

It is hoped that practicing physicians no longer will give knee jerk reactions to the variety of national screening recommendations. Screening criteria that need to be fulfilled include characteristics of the disease, characteristics of the test, and characteristics of the population to be screened. In the day-to-day practice of medicine, six key questions regarding the applications of screening recommendations to individual patients have been developed. These include the qualifying questions regarding the patient's age, frequency of testing, cost effectiveness of testing, realistic practice for the physician, appropriate setting, and applicability to the patient in question. In the future, research in the area of screening needs to focus on the demographics of a greater variety of asymptomatic population groups, the effectiveness of current recommendations and guidelines, and the development of new, effective screening tests.