"During screening, 5 to 10 percent of mammograms show potential abnormalities, requiring doctors to order additional mammograms, ultrasound imaging, biopsies, and other tests. However, about 97 percent of women in their 40s and about 86 percent of women age 50 and over who have a suspicious initial mammogram turn out not to have breast cancer."
A prestigious group that independently evaluates the quality of evidence on medical-screening topics (PDQ) says its most recent review raises uncertainty about whether there's a benefit to mammogram screening. The PDQ report is at www.nci.nih.gov/cancertopics/pdq/screening/breast/healthprofessional
"Mammograms on Trial", Damaris Christensen, Science News, April 27, 2002
Cornelia Baines, MD, with the Canadian National Breast Screening Study, says mammography screening does not reduce the breast cancer death rates for women in their 40s (Annals of Internal Medicine, 9/03/02).
She says: "Breast cancer mortality rates show two peaks: one occurs three years after diagnosis, the other at nine years ... Increasingly, some researchers speculate that something associated with biopsy or surgery in some women stimulates growth factors, which for women with micrometastases ends up stimulating them and then they die." And this was seen in women of all ages, not just those in their 40s.
"Read This Before You Have a Mammogram," HealthFacts, October 2002
"To promote mammography to women under the age of 50 is absolutely unethical."
Michael Baum, MD, emeritus professor of surgery, believes that screening mammograms increase breast cancer deaths. He supports Judah Folkman's suggestion that we rename in situ cancer as "latent cancer." He warns: "If you identify these latent cancers [with mammograms] and biopsy them, you have traumatized the area. You immediately trigger the natural healing mechanisms ... [which] involve angiogenesis ... [A latent cancer] ceases to be latent. A latent disease becomes an aggressive disease." This is not limited to breast cancer. "If you find a symptomless renal tumor by chance and operate, in no time the patient is riddled with metastasis."
(See report on green tea countering this, below.)
"Surgeon Who Headed a U. K. Mammography Program Becomes One of Its Strongest Critics," HealthFacts, October 2002.
Veronica James, a bio-physicist at the Australian National University has found a way to screen women for breast cancer - by looking at one pubic hair. A special molecular structure is present in the hair of those who have breast cancer, and absent in those who don't have it.
