New studies from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston have concluded that the success that mammograms have in decreasing a woman's risk of dying from breast cancer has been overestimated.
The research revealed that women in their 40s had only a 15 percent reduction in chance of death from the disease, while older women in their 60s, who have a greater chance of getting breast cancer than younger women, have a 32 percent reduction, according to The Boston Globe.
The study was published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medicine Association. The research wasn't able to find if mammograms decreased a woman's risk of dying from any cause.
"There's a lot of confusion out there, and we want to find a way to synthesize the literature and present it in a coherent way to doctors," said Dr. Lydia Pace, study co-author and research fellow in women's health at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Pace worked with her colleague Dr. Nancy Keating, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard. After reviewing medical literature on mammography screening, they found that for every 10,000 women who have mammograms each year for 10 years starting at 40, 200 will be diagnosed with breast cancer and will survive, whether or not they have the mammogram. Thirty will die regardless of having the mammogram, and 5 will be saved, wearecentralpa reported.
A total of 700 will have at least one false biopsy, and almost 6,100 will have at least one false positive. Between 40 and 45 women will be over diagnosed, in which their cancer would not be an issue.
"Most women who develop breast cancer would have done well, regardless of whether they had the mammography screening or not, some breast cancers will be missed and some women who are diagnosed with breast cancer will die of breast cancer, regardless of whether they had the mammogram," Keating said.
Dr. Richard Wender, chief cancer control officer for the American Cancer Society, said that younger women should pay attention to the new reports, but also said the studies underestimate the benefits of using mammograms to treat breast cancer, KING5 reported.
Wender said the negative aspects of screening are true, but "I continue to believe that most people in the United States place a high value on preventing a cancer death and will put up with a lot of downsides."
