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If every woman aged between 50 and 79 got a mammogram
every year, it would reduce deaths from breast cancer by
37 percent, according to a new statistical tool described
on Sunday.
Screening these women every two years would reduce mortality
by 30 percent, Sandra Lee and colleagues at Harvard Medical
School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston calculated.
They hope to develop their new program into an Internet
Web
site that women could visit
to calculate their own individual
risk of breast cancer and decide when to have mammograms.
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Feb 20, 2005
"Health
policy makers can use this information to come up with public
screening (recommendations)," Lee told a news conference at
the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science.
"An individual woman can use this to decide what
is better for her. A 7 percent reduction may not be so big
for some women. It may be important for other women."
The American
Cancer Society recommends that women 40 and older have a mammogram
every year. The National Cancer Institute also recommends starting
at 40 and having one every one or two years.
But the British
National Health Service offers mammograms only after 50 and
at three-year intervals, while other European countries often
offer them every two years.
It is difficult to compute the
benefits of mammograms, said Lee, because it would be unethical
to design a study in which half the women were denied mammograms
for decades. So she and colleague Marvin Zelen came up with
a statistical calculator based on various studies of breast
cancer and mammograms.
"It's clear that the more mammograms
you give, the more able you are to locate disease that a person
didn't know about," Zelen said in a statement.
But more tests
can lead to detection of non-cancerous lumps that must be biopsied,
costing money and anxiety.
Lee said her model was not meant
to provide an absolute guide to whether more screening is better.
"Breast
cancer in a woman in her 40s is more aggressive, so it would
make sense to have frequent screening," she said -- even though
breast cancer is more rare in this age group.
And because breast
cancer is more common in women over 50, it could also be argued
that frequent screening benefits this group, she said.
There
are also more benefits to having mammograms than just saving
lives, said Dr. Timothy Rebbeck of the University of Pennsylvania
School of Medicine.
"To the degree that you can identify tumors
earlier, you can be saving some costs," he told the news conference.
Women can have a smaller surgical procedure and perhaps escape
the need for chemotherapy and radiation.
About 1.2 million
people a year are diagnosed with breast cancer globally and
the disease kills 40,000 women and men in the United States
every year.
© Reuters
2005
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Preventive
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