Study: Mammograms Lead To Unnecessary Treatment

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine claims that one third of women treated for breast cancer are treated unnecessarily, because the disease would never have threatened their lives. The Washington Post reports that the study also claims that today’s sharply lower death rate for breast cancer is mainly due to factors such as improved treatments rather than early detection through mammograms. The Post cites two other studies done in the past two years: one, a major study of Norwegian breast cancer patients found that routine mammograms reduced the risk of dying from breast cancer by less than 10 percent; and another found no effect on death rates when comparing European nations where screening became prevalent in the 1990s with those where it became widespread in the 2000s. The researchers involved with the most recent study found that while the number of early-stage cancers doubled over the past three decades, the rate at which women were found to have late-stage cancer dropped by only 8 percent. They attribute the anomaly to better diagnostic technology, that finds breast lesions in such an early state of development it is virtually impossible to distinguish them from benign cell clusters. Read the study here.