GPs rather than other specialists should be leading the expert panels tasked with defining diseases in order to tackle the growing menace of overdiagnosis.

The call has come from leading family doctors who point to conditions such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol and osteoporosis, saying they have been defined as diseases when they are no more than risk factors.

“Family or generalist doctors — who are currently underrepresented on panels that change disease definitions — witness daily how specialist-driven definitions turn too many healthy people into patients, contributing to the overload of primary care systems, with unresourced demand,” the authors write in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.

Disease definitions have too often been altered simply by reducing thresholds to capture more people at lower risk of illness or by the creation of pre-diseases, say the authors led by Professor Paul Glasziou, a GP and professor of evidence-based medicine at Bond University in Queensland.