This latest study may make many doctors shake head in disbelief since there’s an entire culture of getting as many mammograms as one could to stay away from breast cancer.
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“However, there are potential risks as well as benefits associated with breast screening, including over-diagnosis, and it is important that women are given information that is clear and accessible before they go for a mammogram”. The collection of data on mammograms still is too recent to show the importance of such screenings, but experts learn more every year because breat cancer remains an area of active research.
He also said that there are also studies that show the declines in mortalities as results of breast cancer to be the same in regions that integrated mammography in the 80s as others that did the same up to 20 years later. Researchers concluded that because there were no fewer large-size cancers found, and the death rate was not reduced, “these findings suggest widespread overdiagnosis”. The accelerated screening helped detect 16 percent more cancers, wherein 25 percent more small tumors and 7 percent more large ones were found. However, the rate of breast cancer deaths remained unbudged.
However, the researchers found no link between the screening rate and cancer mortality. The limits of two-dimensional mammography – primarily the inability to see fine characteristics and to clearly distinguish between possible lesions and overlapping tissue – frequently result in a need to call women back for further imaging or other tests, such as ultrasound or biopsy.
In fact, the authors wrote, “They are instead either diagnosed early (with no effect on their mortality) or overdiagnosed”.
“My biggest concern with this article is the hint or suggestion that mammography screening does not reduce mortality”, explains Dr. Richard Wender, who is the chief cancer control officer for the American Cancer Society. Together with NTNU postdoctoral fellow Signe Opdahl and the rest of the steering committee, they have gone through all studies done on mammograms in Norway since 2008.
Overdiagnosis means women were diagnosed with and nearly certainly treated for tumors that never would have bothered them or caused symptoms during their lives.
Director of Clinical Investigation for the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, Adam M. Brufsky, MD, told dailyRx News, “Right now, [the study] changes nothing, but it is one more piece of the data suggesting that the cost of more intensive screening may be the detection of less aggressive cancers which require less aggressive treatment”.
“The study doesn’t have enough granularity to say if this particular woman did not get a mammogram, would she have done as well”, he said.
The team of scientists analyzed studies on lung, prostate, cervical, colorectal and breast cancer screenings that were conducted in the 60s and 70s in Sweden. To contact corresponding commentary author Joann G.
Elmore says doctors need to get better at saying “I don’t know”.
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“We did not find any significant change in breast cancer deaths”, Harding said.
