Studies Disagree on Whether Mammograms Prevent Breast Cancer

The debate goes back and forth – do they? Don’t they? But a story at nytimes.com by Nicholas Bakalar says that a study of data from six European countries suggests that, even though you regularly get mammograms, your chances of dying from breast cancer could be just as great as someone who never had one.

Even though deaths from breast cancer have dropped precipitously in most industrialized countries, “it is difficult to know how much of the decline is due to early detection, treatment, or the efficiency of health care systems,” Bakalar writes.

According to the story, researchers looked at groups of countries where some had begun regular mammography screening much earlier than the others. Everything else remained nearly identical, “including their health care systems and socioeconomic levels.” The countries compared to each other, Bakalar writes, were Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; the Netherlands and Belgium, and Sweden and Norway.

But what the study found was that, in all three pairs of countries, starting screening earlier had nothing to do with whether a woman died from breast cancer.
Bakalar gives an example: screening in Northern Ireland began in the early 1990s, and five years later, three-quarters of all women in the country were getting mammograms.

The Republic of Ireland did not introduce mammography until ten years after Northern Ireland did, and it was only in 2008 that 76 percent of the population was screened, he writes. “Yet from 1989 to 2006, breast cancer mortality decreased by 29.6 percent in Northern Ireland and by 26.7 percent in Ireland,” the article points out.

Similarly, from 1989 to 2006 breast cancer deaths decreased by 25 percent in the Netherlands and by 20 percent in Belgium and 25 percent in Flanders; and by 16 percent in Sweden and by 24 percent in Norway, according to the study, which was published online in the British medical journal BMJ July 28.

“We were surprised and quite sad to find that breast cancer screening doesn’t work,” said Dr. Philippe Autier, the lead author, Bakalar writes. “We were expecting to find the reverse.”

However, not all healthcare providers are convinced. The American College of Radiology disputed a similar study published in The Lancet, another British medical journal that mammograms were not beneficial, saying, “The vast majority of health care professionals agree that women benefit from regular mammography screening. The benefits of mammography have not only been clearly shown in randomized, controlled trials, but have also been demonstrated in the general population.”

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