Study finds mammograms cause needless worry

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 25 Oct 2003 - 0:00 PDT

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CHICAGO (USA) - Women in the United States may be undergoing needless biopsies and worry when they are called back for further tests following breast cancer mammography, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The finding from the University of California, San Francisco, was based on a comparison of practices in the United States and Britain.

It found that U.S. women who undergo mammograms are called back for second tests twice as often as women in Britain, yet the breast cancer detection rate in the two countries is about the same.

The difference appears to be that the United Kingdom has a single organized screening program run by its National Health Service that provides virtually all mammography for women 50 and over, the report said.

In the United States the screening is done in a range of places from private practices to medical centers and health maintenance organizations, leading to different standards and less consistent interpretation of test results, it said.

'The recall and negative (non-cancer finding) open surgical biopsy rates associated with screening mammograms were twice as high in the U.S. settings than in the United Kingdom.' said the study published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The recall rates in Britain are now substantially lower than in the United States, apparently because of 'a centralized program of continuous quality improvement,' the study added.

'Efforts to improve U.S. mammographic screening should be targeted to lowering the recall rate without substantially lowering the cancer detection rate,' concluded the report, published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, October 22/29, 2003.

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