Evaluation of a hospital based cytology screening programme for reduction in life time risk of cervical cancer.

Hospital based cytology screening is one of the suggested alternative strategies for the developing countries. The present communication attempts to estimate the reduction in lifetime risk of cervical cancer initiated through a hospital based single lifetime screening programme. The percent reduction in cumulative incidence of cervical cancer during lifetime in different age groups of women was calculated after estimating the number of incident cases in the absence as well as presence of screening. Our analysis revealed that by introducing the single life time cytology screening in the group of hospital attending population, an overall reduction in the cumulative incidence of cervical cancer during lifetime was found to be 10.2%. It was further estimated that the reduction was much less in the early age groups (2.4-10.2% in 20-34 years) as compared to later age groups (11.2-55.6% in 35+ years).