Mamograms - The Hazards

The article summary is reproduced here verbatim:

• It may be reasonable to attend for breast cancer screening with mammography, but it may also be reasonable not to attend because screening has both benefits and harms.

• If 2000 women are screened regularly for 10 years, one will benefit from the screening, as she will avoid dying from breast cancer.

• At the same time, 10 healthy women will, as a consequence, become cancer patients and will be treated unnecessarily. These women will have either a part of their breast or the whole breast removed, and they will often receive radiotherapy and sometimes chemotherapy.

• Furthermore, about 200 healthy women will experience a false alarm. The psychological strain until one knows whether it was cancer, and even afterwards, can be severe.



Gotzsche states that "We believe that if policy makers had had the knowledge we now have when they decided to introduce screening about 20 years ago, when nobody had published data on overdiagnosis or on the imbalance between numbers of prevented deaths from breast cancer and numbers of false positive screening results and the psychosocial consequences of the false alarms, we probably would not have had mammography screening."

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Last Modification - February 27, 2009