Mammography tied to overdiagnosis
New Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) research suggests that routine mammography screening — long viewed as an essential tool in detecting early breast cancers — may in fact lead to a significant amount of overdiagnosis of disease that would have proved harmless. Based on a study of women in Norway, the researchers estimate that between 15 percent and 25 percent of breast cancer cases are overdiagnosed. The study appears in the April 3 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. “Mammography might not be appropriate for use in breast cancer screening because it cannot distinguish between progressive and nonprogressive cancer,” said lead author Mette Kalager, a visiting scientist at HSPH and a researcher at the Telemark Hospital in Norway. “Radiologists have been trained to find even the smallest of tumors in a bid to detect as many cancers as possible to be able to cure breast cancer. However, the present study...