As it is with PSA tests for prostate cancer, so it is with mammograms for breast cancer. A new study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that increased awareness and improved treatments rather than mammograms are the mainly responsible for a diminishing breast cancer mortality rate. Writing in the New York Times, Gina Kolata reports that the study looked at what happened in Norway before and after 1996, when the country began rolling out mammograms for women ages 50 to 69 along with special breast cancer teams to treat all women with breast cancer. The researchers analyzed data from 40,075 Norwegian women diagnosed with breast cancer from 1986 to 2005, a time when treatment was rapidly evolving. They found that 4,791 women died. Kolata reports that starting in 1996, Norway offered mammograms to women ages 50 to 69 and assigned multidisciplinary treatment teams to all women with breast cancer, as is done at many major medical centers in the United States. The researchers found that women 50 to 69 who had mammograms and were treated by the special teams had a 10 percent lower breast cancer death rate than similar women who had had neither. They also found that the death rate fell by 8 percent in women over 70 who had the new treatment teams but had not been invited to have mammograms.
Read more about the study from Gina Kolata.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed, just as we are gearing up for socialized medicine that all these reports are suddenly surfacing discounting physical exams. Hmmm…. paranoid, or perceptive?
My wife is 63 and just had her annual mammogram. A small lump was detected in her breast. The lump was cancerous. The doctor said the lump was so small that it would not have detected without the mammogram. My wife subsequently had a lumpectomy followed by 5 days of intense radiation. Today she is cancer free thanks to the mammogram.
cdhr1, I would say you are perceptive.