Study: Breast Cancer Overtreated

If you have breast cancer, and you live in Australia, Britain, Canada, Norway or Sweden, there is a one in three chance that you will be treated unnecessarily. Yes. One in three. The Boston Globe reports that research conducted at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen and published in the BMJ  found that once breast cancer screening programs began in those countries, more
cases of breast cancer were inevitably picked up. No problem there, but If
a screening program is working, the Globe suggests, there should also be a drop in the
number of advanced cancer cases detected in older women, since their
cancers should theoretically have been caught earlier when they were
screened. Yet the Copenhagen researchers found the national breast cancer screening
systems, which usually test women aged between 50 and 69, simply
reported thousands more cases than previously identified.
Sounds familiar. The Globe also reports that experts have long debated the merits of prostate cancer
screening out of similar concerns that it overdiagnoses patients. A
study in the Netherlands found that as many as two out of every five
men whose prostate cancer was caught through a screening test had
tumors too slow-growing to ever be a threat.
Read more in the Boston Globe.