The Two Faces behind Mammogram Screening
October 24, 2006 by Gloria Gamat
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
Deciding whether to get a regular mammogram?
A new review of studies offers both the good and the bad news to women facing such a decision.
The good news being that screening mammography does reduce breast cancer mortality and the bad news is that women in a screened population are 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed and treated for a cancer that, in the absence of screening, would never have posed a threat to their health.
Lead author Peter Gøtzsche, M.D., director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre (Copenhagen, Denmark) said:
“It is likely that screening mammography reduces breast cancer mortality, but the other side of the coin is the major harm of overdiagnosis and overtreatment.”
Theoretically identifying cancer at its earliest and most treatable stage, mammograms can detect tumors that are too small to be felt as a lump.
In the United States, women are recommended to start having regular mammograms at age 40 while age 50 in Europe.
The abovementioned review of studies on mammograms appears in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates research in all aspects of health care.
Read more from the Center for Advancement of Health News.
