1 in 3 Women with Breast Cancer treated unnecessarily, study concludes

[Michael9100]

Researchers increasingly recognize that not all breast cancers pose the same risk, even if they look the same under a microscope, Brawley said. While some early tumors turn into deadly monsters, others stop growing or even shrink. But assuming that all small breast lesions have the potential to turn deadly is akin to “racial profiling,” Brawley wrote in his editorial.

Yet treating women for cancer unnecessarily can endanger their health, said Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy group. Radiation can damage the heart or even cause new cancers. Visco notes that breast cancer activist Carolina Hinestrosa, a vice president at the coalition, died at age 50 from soft-tissue sarcoma, a tumor caused by radiation used to treat an early breast cancer.

The risks of overdiagnosis and false positives, which can lead women with benign growths to undergo biopsies and other follow-up tests, have caused some experts to reevaluate breast cancer screenings. Although mammograms don’t find all tumors, they reduce the risk of dying from breast cancer by 25 percent to 31 percent for women ages 40 to 69, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Although researchers can estimate the statistical rate of overdiagnosis, doctors treating actual patients can’t definitively tell which breast tumors need treatment and which might be safely ignored, Brawley said. So doctors tend to err on the side of caution and treat all breast cancers with surgery and, in many cases, radiation and chemotherapy.
One In Three Women With Breast Cancer Treated Unnecessarily, Study Concludes

 

[Ms.CuriousCat]

but FYI to all here are some limitations of the study:

Limitations of the current paper, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, include the omission of breast ultrasound and other imaging methods. Breast cancer screening is much better than many people think, in part because it’s not just “mammography,” as considered in this article. As I have written, breast ultrasound is crucial for detecting tumors in premenopausal and some older women who have dense breasts. Others would point out that 3D mammography is much better than 2D, or non-digital before that, and that MRIs and molecular breast imaging can be useful. Yet these other methods are kept out of the story.

Another issue is the cross-sectional nature of this far-from-randomized study. A statistician might inform you that you can’t compare outcomes between distinct groups of women, with age brackets chosen by the analyzers, without accounting for known and potential differences between them. It’s tricky. Yet that’s what the authors did.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.fo...ails-to-persuade/?client=ms-android-orange-gb

Breast Cancer Screening in Denmark | Annals of Internal Medicine | American College of Physicians