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Cervical Cancer Essay

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Cervical cancer screening is a preventive measure – it is testing of all women at risk of cervical cancer from who most will be asymptomatic. According to EU recommendations the screening should start at the age of 20 to 30 years and be extended up to 60 to 65 years with a 3- or 5-year screening interval (17).
There are two types of screening programs – organized and opportunistic. The organized screening involves an explicit policy with specified age categories, method, and interval for screening; a defined target population; a management team responsible for implementation; a health care team for decisions and care; a quality assurance structure; and a method for identifying cancer occurrence in the population (18). These features are based …show more content…

Some of the longest running population-based cervical cancer screening programmes in the world are in the EU countries e.g. Finland and Sweden (19). In Finland the organized screening was established already in 1960s and its incidence and mortality rates from cervical cancer are one the lowest in Europe. The 60% reduction in incidence was achieved already at 10 years after implementation of the organized program (21). Furthermore, the age-standardized corrected mortality rates have dropped by 80% over 45 years (22). Danish organized screening program established also in 1960s, have been proved to reduce significantly the incidence of invasive squamous cervical cancer among women 30 years or older (23). In Norway the population-based nationwide cervical cancer screening program were introduced in 1995 and the incidence rate were already 22% lower than previously after 2 years (24). Another remarkable example is Slovenia where they moved from opportunistic screening to organized screening in a relatively short time and with reasonable governmental investment. As a result, the cervical cancer incidence dropped from 15 to 6 cases per 100 000 during the years 2003-2015

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