Urinary cytology is a non-invasive technique acceptable to those participating in screening programmes. It gives reproducible results and can detect earlier stage disease than that presenting with symptoms in unscreened groups. It has acceptable sensitivity and specificity. Bladder cancer is a disease with significant morbidity and mortality in defined industrial populations and there is a latent period in the natural history of the disease when a screening procedure could be applied. Urinary cytology is capable of detecting abnormalities which are indicative of pre-symptomatic disease provided that the screening procedure is applied frequently enough. It is not possible to show on the basis of existing evidence that early detection enables treatments to be used which increase the length of survival for screened populations. Insufficient work has been done to permit objective assessment of the quality of survival of screened groups or the cost effectiveness of the technique.
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