mardi 14 février 2012

The fallacy of breast cancer screening

The latest Cochrane Review states: "This means that for every 2000 women invited for screening throughout 10 years, one will have her life prolonged. In addition, 10 healthy women, who would not have been diagnosed if there had not been screening, will be diagnosed as breast cancer patients and will be treated unnecessarily. Furthermore, more than 200 women will experience important psychological distress for many months because of false positive findings." 
Screening could be useful for high risk patients and those women could be sceened by a score of risk.
We must care patients in a personalised way, mass screening is not efficient for all so it could be deleterious.

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