Table 1

Overdiagnosis and related concepts

ConceptDefinition
OverdiagnosisA broad term, referring to making people patients unnecessarily, by identifying problems that were never going to cause harm or by medicalising ordinary life experiences.1
OverdetectionIdentification of abnormalities that were never going to cause harm, abnormalities that do not progress, that progress too slowly to cause symptoms or harm during a person’s remaining lifetime, or that resolve spontaneously eg. many prostate cancers found on screening.1
Overdefinition by threshold changeLowering the threshold for a risk factor without evidence that doing so helps people feel better or live longer eg. lowering diagnostic threshold of hypertension.1
Overdefinition by expanding disease definitionsExpanding disease definitions to include patients with ambiguous or very mild symptoms and used to increase the market for treatments; sometimes referred to as ‘disease mongering’ eg. female sexual dysfunction label for low libido.1 4
OvertreatmentOvertreatment occurs when the best scientific evidence demonstrates that a treatment provides no benefit for the diagnosed condition eg. antibiotic use in viral infection.4
Overutilisation/overuseEstablishment of standard practice in health services or systems that do not provide net benefit to patients or citizens eg. standard blood test panels.4
Low-value careLow-value care is the use of an intervention where evidence suggests it confers no or very little benefit on patients, or risk of harm exceeds likely benefit, or, more broadly, the added costs of the intervention do not provide proportional added benefits eg. screening in low-risk populations.5
Too much medicineAn umbrella term to include all of the above concepts.4