Breast cancer screening could over-diagnose

Breast cancer screening could be over-diagnosing women at a rate of ten per cent, a study published today has found.

Over diagnosis, according to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), is a medical case that would have never come to clinical attention without the application of modern screening methods.

In the latest study, which followed the participants from a large Swedish breast screening trial for 15 years, one in ten women was found to be over-diagnosed with breast cancer as compared to an unscreened control group.

The results have renewed calls for women to be given more balanced information about the benefits and harms of breast screening. A previous BMJ published study of mammography invitations in both English-speaking and Scandinavian countries had found that none of the invitations provided information on the risk of over-diagnosis.

It argued that publicly funded screening centres may be suffering from a “conflict of interest”, where the requirement to inform of benefits and risks to obtain informed consent may conflict with the need to gain a high uptake of screenings.

Commenting on the latest study results, the BMJ has advised that while improvements in mammography need to be made, the procedure “does save lives”.

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