Interesting article. This quote at the end has been in several news articles around the media outlets:
"The risk of missing a breast cancer because mammography is not done far exceeds the tiny risk of mammography causing a breast cancer," Hendrick said.
The benefits of screening mammography to women in their 40s is 1 less cancer death per 2000 women screened. That's a 15% mortality reduction. In other words, of the 8 women destined to die of breast cancer, we can save 1 with screening mammography.
When you compare this benefit to the lifetime risk of dying of breast cancer because of screening mammography, there's a 20 in 100,000 risk meaning 2 in 10,000 or .2 in 1000 risk. So of those 2000 40yo women screened 0.4 will die of breast cancer because of the test over the course of her lifetime.
This doesn't even take into account the greater harm of screening mammography, the unnecessary diagnosis of breast cancers that would never cause symptoms if never discovered on a screening test. Returning to the same 2000 women aged 40, 10 will be diagnosed with a 100% curable cancer that need not be found. 10 will undergo biopsy, fear, surgery/chemo/radiation to "cure" something that was harmless to begin with.
So there's a 1 in 2000 chance screening mammography will save your life
0.4 in 2000 chance it will cause fatal breast cancer
and 10 in 2000 it'll give you a cancer you need not have known about
It's also worth nothing that the person who said
"The risk of missing a breast cancer because mammography is not done far exceeds the tiny risk of mammography causing a breast cancer,"
works for the companies that make the new expensive digital mammography machines and other newer machines to replace mammography, companies like General Electric.
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Interesting article. This quote at the end has been in several news articles around the media outlets:
"The risk of missing a breast cancer because mammography is not done far exceeds the tiny risk of mammography causing a breast cancer," Hendrick said.
The benefits of screening mammography to women in their 40s is 1 less cancer death per 2000 women screened. That's a 15% mortality reduction. In other words, of the 8 women destined to die of breast cancer, we can save 1 with screening mammography.
When you compare this benefit to the lifetime risk of dying of breast cancer because of screening mammography, there's a 20 in 100,000 risk meaning 2 in 10,000 or .2 in 1000 risk. So of those 2000 40yo women screened 0.4 will die of breast cancer because of the test over the course of her lifetime.
This doesn't even take into account the greater harm of screening mammography, the unnecessary diagnosis of breast cancers that would never cause symptoms if never discovered on a screening test. Returning to the same 2000 women aged 40, 10 will be diagnosed with a 100% curable cancer that need not be found. 10 will undergo biopsy, fear, surgery/chemo/radiation to "cure" something that was harmless to begin with.
So there's a 1 in 2000 chance screening mammography will save your life
0.4 in 2000 chance it will cause fatal breast cancer
and 10 in 2000 it'll give you a cancer you need not have known about
It's also worth nothing that the person who said
"The risk of missing a breast cancer because mammography is not done far exceeds the tiny risk of mammography causing a breast cancer,"
works for the companies that make the new expensive digital mammography machines and other newer machines to replace mammography, companies like General Electric.
August 31, 2010 - 8:11amThis Comment
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