Define health screening

The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2007, 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. screening Drug development The process by which candidate substances for drug development are evaluated in a battery of assays (screens) designed to detect a specific biological property or activity. Screening can be conducted randomly, and substances tested without preselection criteria (which is highly inefficient) or targeted, where information on a substance with known activity and structure is used as a basis for selecting other similar substances on which to run the battery of tests. Medspeak A health service in which all members of a defined and currently asymptomatic population (e.g., sexually active women over age 18 or men over age 50) are evaluated by a screening test to detect a disease process (e.g., cancer (CA) or pre-CA of the uterine cervix in young women, or prostate CA in older men not known to have CA at the time of evaluation). Screening tests measure specific clinical (e.g., blood pressure for hypertension) or lab parameters (e.g., cholesterol for atherosclerosis or blood in stool for colorectal CA). Screening tests have high sensitivities and low specificities, allowing detection of most patients with a morbid condition, while having the acceptable disadvantage of a high rate of false positivity (screening tests by definition have a high sensitivity but low specificity). Health screening recommendati...