Experiences with multiphasic screening for cancer

This study reports on our experiences with a multiphasic cancer screening clinic for the detection of early-stage cancers. The clinic under review is the Prevention-Detection Clinic (PDC) housed at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo. The PDC offers both free cancer screening examinations and risk-reduction education and counseling. Since its inception in May 1979 through 1984, over 13,000 individuals have been screened and counseled. Names of screenees were recently matched against the files of the Western New York Tumor Registry, a population-based cancer registry, to identify screenees subsequently diagnosed with cancer. Matching identified a total of 332 individuals with a cancer diagnosis. Of these, 98 individuals were found to have been diagnosed prior to screening. Of the remaining 234 individuals, 135 were diagnosed after referral from the PDC, 23 went undetected at screening, and 76 were either diagnosed several years after screening or with recurrent disease. The majority of cancers (67%) were detected with in situ/localized stages of disease.