Macquarie Uni Awarded Funds for Project to Prevent Overdiagnosis

An investigative study into the evaluation of disease and cost burdens of overdiagnosis has been announced as one of several new research projects within Macquarie University to be awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant.

The Australian government announced that the project “Defining disease: addressing the problem of overdiagnosis”, lead by Professor of Clinical Ethics Wendy Rogers, has received a Future Fellowship worth $820,156 over four years.

“The project has quite ambitious aims, which are to develop an account of disease that will help to guide practitioners and policy makers about which abnormalities or conditions should be labelled as disease,” said Professor Rogers.

The ensuing account of disease will make a practical contribution to growing international concern about asymptomatic people being diagnosed and treated for conditions that will not cause any health problems (overdiagnosis). The research will provide grounds for evaluating disease claims. Results will reduce the harm caused by people receiving treatment that they do not require, make a practical contribution to debates about the scope of health care, and yield findings that can help to reduce the cost burdens associated with overdiagnosis.

“There has been quite a lot of attention on overdiagnosis, which includes a range of situations in which people without symptoms are investigated and treated, for what are probably harmless abnormalities. At the same time, the thresholds for defining diseases such as type 2 diabetes or chronic kidney disease have been falling, so that more and more people are being diagnosed. "So we get the situation in which otherwise healthy and asymptomatic people are turned into

patients by performing investigations, allocating diagnoses or providing treatments that do not improve patients’ health, and may actually harm them.

“In this situation, it's important to be clear about what we mean when we say a condition is adisease, but at the moment, there is little agreement on this. So there are philosophical questions to answer here, about defining disease, as well as ethical questions about the benefits and harms of defining disease in different ways, and the costs of treating people who are unlikely to benefit,” said Professor Rogers.

A total of 34 Macquarie University research projects were successful in receiving a grant, including eight Future Fellowships ($5, 996, 004 total funding), 21 Discovery Projects ($7, 466,683 total funding), and five Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRAs) ($1, 787, 254total funding)