Breast cancer screening not as effective as most hope
The Guardian has an article that looks at the results of breast cancer screening in Denmark.
There is increasing concern that mammograms are forcing treatment on women who would be quite safe without it. Many small cancers are slow growing and won’t kill but they can’t tell that until they cut them out and douse the remains with chemotherapy just to “make sure” so that in the end the cure can be worse than the disease.
So it is not surprising that the Denmark study, which compared breast cancer outcomes between areas that had a screening program and those that did not, found that breast cancer screening was of no great benefit. But who would have thought that they would find that it was worse?
Among women who’d been offered screening, the breast cancer death rate fell by 1 percent between 1997 and 2006. In the same 10 years, breast cancer deaths in areas where screening wasn’t routine fell by 2 percent.
Whatever the reason, the conclusion is that whole-scale screening program are not necessarily effective.
