Although new diagnostics may advance the time of diagnoses in selected patients, they will increase the frequency of false alarms, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment in others. Bjorn Hofmann and H. Gilbert Welch explain how to minimize harm. Efforts to detect disease early can always be accompanied by unintended harms. These include false alarms and indeterminate findings that can worry patients, drive more testing, increase clinical workload, and distract clinicians from more important work. Overdiagnosis can lead to unnecessary treatments.

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