All women and people with a cervix every five years now smear test

[justasking111]

Five years in Wales is this the norm in England, Scotland, Ireland?

Our surgery put it up on their FB page this week.

It was three years here last time I checked.

Yabu it's fine no reason to be concerned

Yanbu it's too big a gap.

You're a doctor who is against regular blood pressure checks for the over-60s, and think that it's "too much medicine"?

High blood pressure puts you at risk of numerous life threatening illnesses. I'm mean as a doctor, you must know that - so why would you be against encouraging free blood pressure checks for patients?

We do not have screening programme for hypertension currently. This paper explains why - essentially there are no good studies indicating benefits or harms. https://www.cochrane.org/CD013212/HTN_screening-strategies-hypertension

This is not the same as making a decision whether to treat hypertension when it is found, or testing someone with significant risk of hypertension or other cardiovascular disease. It's a subtle but important distinction - overdiagnosis involves further tests and medications that may not be needed or may cause harm. We need to be driven by evidence and be wary of 'helpful' case-finding programmes that are not supported by evidence.

AGain, if you are worried about BP, please get it checked. And make an informed decision re medication etc. Better still, address lifestyle factors that cause hypertension before it develops.

Wel I am not a doctor but I know that more often than not, one asymptomatic high BP measure means nothing. Reporting it via a website where there is no facility to validate it even for simple input error means even less. Come to think of it, the website link wasn't a usual NHS one and there was no mention of what would be done with the information.....I smell big pharma here.....

It is obtuse and shitty to deliberately exclude someone from accessing medical care.

No one is excluding anyone from medical care don't be so absolutely ridiculous.

I'm sure anyone with a cervix is already perfectly aware they are biologically female regardless of how they choose to identify.

The link you've included promotes checking blood pressure.

Including women and girls from ethnic minorities for whom English is not a first language and who are significantly under represented when it comes to screening programs and early presentation with symptoms. Ambiguous, wooly language increases the risk of those women and girls NOT recognising the message about cervical screening is targeted at them.

One result is not enough so it is advised you check it regularly. Like at boots, or with your GP. If it's high at your first check, you should make further checks.

Refusing any check doesn't make sense imo.

even if its an unverified one off check?

What do you mean by "unverified"?

A one off check will show if it's high and so if further tests are needed.

Why wouldn't you want to check it? What's the benefit of not knowing?

The new test is vaginal swab for hpv

I'm not going to argue about blood pressure. Though mine was once dangerously high and I refused medication and got it down to normal on my own.
Did you know though there were NO random controlled trials as to how effective smears were? No comparison of smeared and unsmeared women? The teat was just rolled out and inflicted on us

Plus transmen and some non binary.

.As a pp said, HPV can lie dormant for decades and affect anyone who's ever had sex.
You can get HPV from skin to skin contact so you can still get it even if you have never had sex.

Good that you got it checked! Hopefully others will too.

Do you think the reason there were no random controlled trials of cervical screening (if that was indeed the case) is due to ethics?

Once the test was available, would it not be unethical to refuse to test some women for cancer, or to only pretend to, just to see how many women got cancer without screening?

The test is voluntary, and a privilege at that. So I'm not sure why you say it is "inflicted" on anybody.

The test was just rolled out and inflicted on us.
You have a choice. You get a letter you can take it up or not just like all the other screening tests offered. I had regular smears from 19 - 45 I found them extremely painful but went through it because they checked the cells. Now they only check for HPV I don't bother. If I want to test I can get a HPV test from superdrug to do myself. I do hope they do roll out the home testing I think they will get a massive uptake on it by reading on past posts of the trauma of going to get one can cause.

Well, what word would you use? No trials were done to measure the effectiveness of this test. To start with they thought everyone with abnormal results had cancer or would develop it. So much over treatment. Even today over treatment is still an issue. Dr Papancilous had a hard time getting his test taken seriously. I genuinely believe it was big pharma and money, American medicine being mainly private, how can we make more money? Get women in every year for a smear! So women were just told get this test! Why? No trials were done! For whatever reason?
It's for everyone to make up their own minds about this test, and obviously their decisions are valid whatever they decide. I have done my own research. I've opted out. Ditto mammograms.

"Unverified" because
In the circumstance I was describing,
1 the person was aked to use their own machine if they had one. No verification that it was accurate or that it was used correctly. BUT even if they had gone to the chemist,
2 the results were then texted in so no verification that the sender had actually entered the right numbers, hadn't "adjusted" it to a better result (Why? same reason people lie to doctors about alcohol intake. As Dr House famously said "Everyone lies"). Of course they also could just have made a number up!

Again I say that a one off asymptomatic high blood pressure reading tells NOTHING even if its an accurate one.

Yes it can, however we are over treating women whose cells may never have developed cervical cancer in their lifetimes.

We are now starting to look at the evidence:

ebm.bmj.com/content/23/Suppl_2/A43.2

"Conclusions In cervical cancer screening, precancerous lesions have been identified as the target of cancer screening. These lesions have been resected, and the adoption of this approach has expanded despite the high possibility of the disappearance of these lesions. Overdiagnosis of cervical cancer screening has not been investigated until recently and the studies regarding overdiagnosis have been few. However, its frequency was high in recent reports. Until recently, overdiagnosis has been ignored in cervical cancer screening and has led to overtreatment of precancerous lesions. In developed countries, the incidence of cervical cancer has decreased and has not become a serious burden. In addition, the natural history of the development of cervical cancer has also been clarified. Although cervical cancer screening has high impact of reeducation from cervical cancer, the balance of benefits and harms including overdiagnosis should be reconsidered"

’People with a cervix’ are women.

Let’s clear that up right now.

deleted as it posted twice!

Please read the warning message from Mumsnet. You are off topic.

It's the 21 % of cervical cancers that aren't caused by HPV that concerns me. No early detection for those.
Edit - there's always cost cutting behind these decisions, if you look closely at reasons given.

I suspect its a pity that the term "precancerous" was ever created and used. There is a distinct implication there that such abnormal cells are a definite herald of a terminal illness.

can I ask where you got 21% from? This says 3 to 8%. Additionally this piece of research makes clear that all that can be said is that they occured in HPV negative women which doesn't mean they never had HPV, only that it wasn't found on testing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9537028/#:~:text=Cervical%20cancer%20is%20the%20fourth,%2D8%25%20of%20all%20cases.