New Pap smear guidelines

The annual Pap smear is now officially a thing of the past, as new national guidelines recommend cervical cancer screening no more often than every three years. The new guidelines, issued on Wednesday by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, replace recommendations last issued in 2003 and use more decisive language to advise women to undergo screening less often. The new guidelines were published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Cost is not a factor in the task force recommendations. Instead, its members focus on the effectiveness of a screening test to reduce cancer deaths, balanced against the potential harms that accompany the screening. The worry about frequent Pap smear screening is that tests can result in a large number of false positives that lead to sometimes painful biopsies and put women at risk for pregnancy complications in the future, like preterm labor and low-birth-weight infants.