Do Breast Cancer Screening Saves Lives?

A recent study published at the British Medical Journal (march 2010) was unable to find any benefit associated with the breast cancer screening program on breast cancer mortality. There was no difference between screened and non screened areas considering breast cancer mortality eluding the idea that mammography for screening has no importance at all…ops!!!

Intriguingly, the study found a mortality decline of 1% per year in the screening areas and 2% decline in non-screening areas for the same 10 year period. For patients too old to be screened there was no difference in breast cancer mortality and for patients too young to benefit from screening (35-55 years old) the mortality declined 5% per year during 1997-2006 in screened and 6% in non-screened areas.

The study included all Danish women recorded in the Cancer Registry from 1971-2006. They used the population of Copenhagen as the screened population (that began in 1991) and all other areas as non-screened areas.

A previous study attributed to screening a reduction in 25% of breast cancer mortality in women living in Copenhagen. As the authors say “there are, however, substantial problems in using observational studies to estimate the effect of screening. For example, a decline in breast cancer mortality following the introduction of screening would not necessarily be caused by screening”. Actually, most benefit associated with recent breast cancer mortality reduction can be attributed to better and more effective treatment.

So what to do?

Well… I would keep the screening … all available data is too biased to be conclusive…

What we really know: Breast cancer mortality decline is clearly associated with our steady effort to diagnose and introduce effective treatment earlier. Today, virtually all women with breast cancer are candidate to adjuvant treatment…

See article: KJ Jørgensen, et al BMJ 2010;340:c1241 http://ht.ly/1DPq1
See different opinion from another study (at msnbc): http://ht.ly/1DPvl