Unsuspected Cancer

Every year, no less than 16,000 U.S. women, most of them comparatively young, die of cancer of the cervix. Doctors have long known that the key to controlling cancer is prompt diagnosis, and they have convinced a large section of the public that if a woman has any suspicious symptoms she should go at once to her doctor for examination. But that is not enough, the A.M.A. Journal warned last week: if the needlessly early deaths from cervical cancers are to be avoided, women who have no apparent symptoms of the disease must also take a cancer test.

Boston's Dr. Maurice Fremont-Smith has given a vaginal smear test as a matter of course to nearly all his new women patients for more than five years. Eleven out of 704 showed positive, and one of these proved false. Of the ten who had cancer, seven had the disease in such an early stage that prompt treatment gave them a 90% (or better) chance of surviving five years, and a 65% chance of living ten years. In ordinary practice, most cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed so late that only two victims out of five are in time to get the full benefits of surgery or other treatment.

The striking thing about Dr. Fremont-Smith's patients was that only one of the ten cancer victims had gone to see him because she was worried about cancer. The others had such unrelated complaints as fatigue, arthritis, hay fever and headaches. Dr. Fremont-Smith believes that physicians in general will find an early, curable cancer of the cervix in one out of every hundred new patients, if only they will give the test.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.