Some breast cancers just go away, researchers say
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Mammograms’ ability to detect breast tumors has made them both a routine screening tool and the source of considerable controversy. A new study suggests that controversy won’t be fading anytime soon.
The breast X-rays often find lumps that ultimately prove not to be cancer, causing, at the very least, worry among patients but sometimes leading to invasive treatment as well. Most women and their doctors understandably do not want to take a wait-and-see approach.
But now researchers say that mammograms detect some cancers that would go away on their own.
In a report published Nov. 24 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health compared breast cancer rates among regularly screened women (three mammograms in six years) with rates among women who had only one screening at the end of six years.
The regularly screened group had higher rates of breast cancer during that time frame than did the control group. No surprise there. But you’d think that the total number of cancers would be about the same among both groups at the end of six years. Not so.
The regularly screened group had 22% more cancers overall than did the control group. The researchers’ conclusion? Some breast cancers go away on their own.
The study states:
‘It appears that some breast cancers detected by repeated mammographic screening would not persist to be detectable by a single mammogram at the end of 6 years. This raises the possibility that the natural course of some screen-detected invasive breast cancers is to spontaneously regress.’
Here’s the full study. And here’s a fact sheet from the National Cancer Institute on screening mammograms.
And from The Times’ Opinion pages earlier this month: The excessive focus on mammography. It sums up, quite nicely, the well-established pitfalls of mammograms. This new study is likely to further complicate the screening and treatment picture.
-- Tami Dennis