May 11 (Bloomberg) -- A third of men and a quarter of women undergoing cancer screening will get false positive results by the time they have undergone four tests, which can lead to inappropriate medical procedures, a study found.

Men’s risk of a false-positive finding was 36.7 percent by the fourth screening, and women’s risk of the wrong result was 26.2 percent by the fourth of the 14 routinely recommended tests possible for each patient, according to the research published in Annals of Family Medicine. Almost 1 in 5 men and 1 in 10 women were likely to undergo an invasive diagnostic procedure such as a biopsy due to a false positive after four tests.

Many cancer screening tests are recommended to the public, as some doctors say that the earlier a malignancy is diagnosed, the easier it is to treat. The American Cancer Society recommends colon cancer screens for men and women ages 50 and older.

“Messages about screening have been oversimplified to ‘Early detection saves lives,’ and that’s the end, and people are made to feel irresponsible if they don’t test,” said Jennifer Croswell, the study’s lead author and acting director of the office of medical applications of research at the Bethesda-based National Institutes of Health, in a telephone interview today. “It’s a more nuanced decision than that. The more times you intervene, the greater the chance is you’re going to have harm.”

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