Over 7,000 women a year get false breast cancer alert - Times Online

Over 7,000 women a year get false breast cancer alert - Times Online

Thousands of women who attend routine breast screening checks are wrongly told that they have life-threatening cancer and undergo unnecessary treatment each year, researchers claim today.

An independent scientific review of the NHS breast screening programme accuses the Government of providing misleading propaganda to persuade women of the benefits of screening, without mentioning the drawbacks.

Ministers, health charities and the majority of doctors encourage women to have regular mammograms in middle age on the basis of estimates that the checks save 1,400 lives each year.

However, the review by the Nordic Cochrane Centre, in Copenhagen, disputes the value of the checks, saying that there is “no convincing evidence” that screening has saved so many lives.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the researchers say that improvements in breast cancer survival are more to do with improvements in treatment, rather than detection through screening. They add that many healthy women who attend screenings may have had benign conditions “overdiagnosed” by doctors and endured gruelling surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

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As well as detecting tumours developing in the breast, mammography also identifies women who have ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) — precancerous lesions contained in the milk ducts, which may develop into cancer.

Up to half of women who receive a diagnosis of DCIS never go on to develop breast cancer but, as it is not possible to predict who will, all women with abnormalities are treated with surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

Professor Peter Gøtzsche, the lead author of the Cochrane review, said that more than 21,000 women aged 50 to 69 had breast cancer diagnosed in Britain in 2007. He added that one in three of the cancers diagnosed among the screened age group could be “unnecessary” diagnoses of benign DCIS.

“Each year 7,000 women in the UK receive an unnecessary breast cancer diagnosis and unnecessary breast cancer treatment because of overdiagnosis in the NHS breast screening programme,” he said. ...