Unlike irradiation and crushing by mammography, Sure Touch physical (pressure transducer) scanning on its own combined with usual clinical exam is similar to ultrasound in scope and feel, but better – in comparative trials is like if not better than mammography in sensitivity and specificity, but without the significant harms of crushing and xray irradiating mammography. ( Only tissue biopsy can confirm or exclude potentially threatening cancer (or pick up- over-diagnose- pre-cancers -many of which are best left unknown in eg breast, prostate, colon, will never cause cancer disease in lifetime).
As Prof Peter Gotzsche says, WELL people with a silent ie tiny internal cancer – whether in situ eg DCIS, or localized, DO NOT HAVE DISEASE; ie such silent lumps vanishingly rarely cause illhealth.
see latest warnings at
Too Much Medicine Alexandra Barrett Univ Sydney, Australia: Overdiagnosis in mammography screening: a 45 year journey from shadowy idea to acknowledged reality: note the graph about overdiagnosis, that as with screening for silent prostate cancer, the rate of advanced cancer hasnt increased with invasive screening, DESPITE the ~40% futile increase in (early) breast cancer diagnosis by crushing, biopsy , irradiation and surgery. Not saving lives , but perhaps earlier death by screening terrorizing, , burning, cutting and poisoning. .
2 March 2015: this update says it al about the futility and risks of breast cancer mammography screening:
Breast Cancer Screening: Benefits and Harms: Jill Jin, MD, MPH
For More Information: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States.
BENEFITS OF SCREENING Screening for breast cancer means looking for signs of breast cancer in all women, even if they have no symptoms. The goal of screening is to catch cancers early. Early-stage cancers are easier to treat than later-stage cancers, and the chance of survival is higher. Routine screening for breast cancer lowers one’s risk of dying of breast cancer.
Screening for breast cancer is done by mammography. A mammogram is a special series of x-rays taken of the breast. A doctor looks for any abnormal signs or patterns on the mammogram that might be breast cancer. These signs usually show up on the mammogram before any lump can be felt in the breast. If there is anything unusual on the mammogram, more tests have to be done. These tests can include another mammogram, an ultrasound, or a biopsy. Studies have shown that women who have routine mammograms have 10% to 25% less chance of dying of breast cancer than women who do not have mammograms.
CURRENT US SCREENING GUIDELINESIn the United States, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women aged 50 to 74 years get a screening mammogram every 2 years. For women younger than 50 years, some women may choose to be screened, but not all women need to be. This depends on several factors, as discussed below.
POSSIBLE HARMS OF SCREENING Mammograms are not perfect tests. Some cancers are missed by a mammogram. On the other hand, sometimes mammograms find things that look like cancer but turn out not to be cancer. This is called a false-positive result. False-positive mammogram results lead to more testing, which is time consuming and can cause unnecessary anxiety. On average, among all 50-year-old women who start breast cancer screening, more than half will have a false-positive mammogram result over the next 10 years
Another possible harm of screening is overdiagnosis. This means finding something on a mammogram that is breast cancer or has a chance of becoming breast cancer, but is such a low-risk type of tumor that it would never have caused any health problems if left alone. Instead, because it was found on mammogram, standard cancer treatment, such as surgery and radiation therapy, is recommended. In cases of overdiagnosis, these treatments are unnecessary and costly and can have both physical and psychological side effects. It is difficult to know exactly how often overdiagnosis happens, but some studies estimate that 1 in 5 breast cancers found on mammograms are overdiagnosed and lead to unnecessary treatment.
BALANCING BENEFITS AND HARMS The pros and cons of breast cancer screening are different for every woman. Age is an important factor. Even though the general recommendation is to start screening at 50 years of age, for women at higher risk (such as those who have breast cancer in their family), it may be a good idea to start screening at a younger age. Each woman also has different personal values, especially toward the idea of unnecessary medical tests and treatments.
12 February 2015 Why I’m Opting out of Mammography Christie Aschwanden1 JAMA Intern Med. at a routine appointment a few days after my 40th birthday, my gynecologist gave me a prescription for a mammogram. There was no discussion, no explanation. Just a slip of paper, handed to me without a word as I left the examination room. When I asked the doctor what she’d just given me, she told me it was an order for a mammogram. I could call the number to schedule an appointment. “Wait—why should I get a mammogram?” I asked. “Because it could save your life.” Her voice conveyed a note of impatience… read on..
24 Jan 2015 early diagnosis ( by screening the well), and treatment of pre-cancer of eg breast and prostate is increasingly discredited as dangerous, especially for women at ~10years younger prime-of life ( and much higher risk than men) due to menopause. .
so just how safe can it be- for cancer spread, and misdiagnosis- when needle biopsy is done on a silent 7mm incidentally palpated lump, and the surgeon sticks a needle in (blind) and stirs up the lump before biopsy. What does stage 1A at the excision 2 months later mean then?
BACKGROUND . we have oft reported below that the mammoth
ATLAS trial showed that after diagnosis of preclinical “cancer” at around 50years (by screening mammography, biopsy, mostly mastectomy or DHRT, then annual screening mammo on tamoxifen for 5 to 10 years), 15 years after diagnosis, of the hundreds of women who had by then died +-70-yrs old of diverse causes, only 14% had had clinical cancer recurrence but
45% had silent breast cancer present at autopsy.
This is the same cancer rate found in random adults killed in accidents. SO WHAT MAMMOGRAPHY SCREENING OF WELL BREASTS ACHIEVED EXCEPT COUNTLESS IRRADIATION, SURGERIES AND THUS STRESS?
Now the
IBIS-1 trial shows that
Between 1992 and 2001, 7154 eligible women aged 35 to 70 years were randomized to 5 years of tamoxifen 20 mg/day or placebo. All women were deemed to be at increased risk for breast cancer based on predefined family history or benign breast disease criteria. In this 20-year follow-up report, the cumulative incidence of breast cancer (defined as invasive breast cancer or DCIS) was reduced ~47% from 12.3% with placebo to 7.8% with tamoxifen (P < .001). Reductions were seen in the risk for developing ER-positive breast cancer (HR, 0.66) and DCIS (HR, 0.65) but not ER-negative breast cancer (HR, 1.05). BUT There was no significant difference in breast cancer–specific or overall mortality. –and in IBIS1, tamoxifen increased uterine cancer rate from 20 on placebo to 29 on tamoxifen, of whom
5 women in the tamoxifen group died from endometrial cancer compared with none in the placebo group (P = .06).and in the
Asian- Taiwan population-based cohort study to assess whether tamoxifen treatment is associated with an increased incidence of diabetes. in 22 257 breast cancer patients diagnosed between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2004, 15 210 cases received tamoxifen treatment and 7047 did not. Four subjects without breast cancer were frequency-matched by age and index year as the control group. Breast cancer patients exhibited a 14% higher rate of developing diabetes (adjusted HR=1.14, 95% CI=1.08–1.20) compared with non-breast cancer controls, but the significant difference was limited to tamoxifen users. In addition, tamoxifen users exhibited a 31% significantly increased risk of diabetes compared with non-tamoxifen users among women diagnosed with breast cancer (adjusted HR=1.31, 95% CI=1.19–1.45). Stratification by age groups indicated that both younger and older women diagnosed with breast cancer exhibited a significantly higher risk of diabetes than the normal control subjects did, and tamoxifen users consistently exhibited a significantly higher diabetes risk than non-tamoxifen users or normal control subjects did, regardless of age. Both recent and remote uses of tamoxifen were associated with an increased likelihood of diabetes.
And Tamoxifen prevention lessens future breast cancer, but both tamoxifen and the enormous burden of mass screening do not save lives, create vast numbers of patients. so early diagnosis and treatment of preclinical breast cancer- overdiagnosis- does not save lives, in fact seriously increases non-breastcancer mortality including by increasing diabetes, melanoma, deepvein thrombosis, uterine carcinoma, depression-stress-related vascular disease, etc..
22 January 2015
Commentary: Prof Peter Gøtzsche Nordic Cochrane, Denmark. Int. J. Epidemiol. Jan 2015: SCREENING- A SEDUCTIVE PARADIGM THAT HAS GENERALLY FAILED US: “Screening healthy people has face value and great public and political appeal. It looks so simple, and yet screening is fraught with difficulties. These start already with the terminology, and common slogans like, ‘Catch the disease early, before it has produced any symptoms!’ are misleading on two counts.
First, disease means lack of ease, which is not what we understand by being healthy; but people who work with screening tend to forget that they deal with healthy people. For example, women being invited to mammography screening are often called patients in scientific articles. The second error is the assumption that the disease is caught early. That is rarely the case, and breast cancer is again a good example. If we assume that the growth rate for a particular cancer is constant, then the women have harboured the cancer for 21 years on average before it is large enough to be detected by mammography screening.1 Finding precursors to cancer is of course an entirely different matter.
A third problem with screening is that it always causes harm. Sometimes it also leads to benefits, and sometimes the benefits are sufficiently large to outweigh the harms. The main focus in screening trials should therefore be to quantify the harms, but this has rarely been the case, if ever. Screening trials focus on disease-specific mortality, which may seem natural, but it is the wrong outcome. Screening leads to overdiagnosis, and interventions that are beneficial for real patients can be lethal for healthy overdiagnosed people. Radiotherapy of overdiagnosed women may kill at least as many as those who are spared dying from breast cancer by attending breast screening.2
Total mortality should therefore be the primary outcome in screening trials of mortality, and Saquib et al. report a systematic review in this issue of the journal that aimed at clarifying whether screening lowers total mortality for diseases that carry a high disease-specific mortality.3 They focused on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They did not find any screening trials for hypertension or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Disease-specific mortality was reduced with ultrasound for abdominal aortic aneurysm in men, mammography for breast cancer and faecal occult blood test and flexible sigmoidoscopy for colorectal cancer, but the risk ratio point estimates for all-cause mortality were all very close to 1.00 (range 0.98–1.03).
Screening proponents often say that disease-specific mortality is the right outcome, arguing that in order to show an effect on total mortality, trials would become unrealistically large. I believe this argument is invalid, for both scientific and ethical reasons. We do randomized trials in order to avoid bias, and our primary outcome should therefore not be a biased one. Drug interventions are usually more common in a screened group, and they tend to increase mortality for a variety of non-disease related reasons.4
From an ethical perspective, it is problematic to screen the whole population in a certain age group without knowing whether this makes people live longer, while knowing almost certainly that it makes people less happy. It took 50 years after the first randomized trial of mammography started before we knew what the psychological consequences are of the many false-positive findings.5 A specially designed questionnaire was developed using focus groups and women who had attended screening were followed up for 3 years. Even after so long a time, those who had experienced a false-positive diagnosis had an anxiety level (and other psychological problems) that fell between that for women with breast cancer and women who had always been told they did not have cancer. This study showed for the first time that the psychological harms of breast screening are substantial and long-lasting, and they affect a huge number of healthy women, as the cumulative risk of a false-positive result after 10 mammograms ranges from about 20% to 60%.6 Added to this comes the psychological harm inflicted on all the overdiagnosed women who do not know that they are overdiagnosed but think that they suffer from a fatal disease. It is therefore pretty clear that any utility analysis that takes the psychological harms of breast screening into account will come out negative, as was recently reported by the Swiss Medical Board.7
It is worth noting that when screening does not work, it might be because beneficial effects are outweighed by harmful ones. Diabetes drugs, for example, are approved on the basis of their glucose-lowering effect without knowing what they do to patients. And the only large trial of tolbutamide ever performed was stopped prematurely because the drug increased cardiovascular mortality.4 Rosiglitazone was once the most-sold diabetes drug in the world, but it was taken off the market in Europe in 2010 as it causes myocardial infarction and cardiovascular death; and pioglitazone has been linked to heart failure and bladder cancer.4
Screening is popular, but we need to be much more careful in the future when we contemplate approaching healthy people with our screening tests, and should demand much stronger evidence than when we treat patients.”
Stanford University Saquib ea.Int J Epidemiol. 2015 Jan.
Screening for disease doesnt save lives in asymptomatic adults? Systematic review of meta-analyses and randomized trials. Several popular screening tests, such as mammography and prostate-specific antigen, have met with wide controversy and/or have lost their endorsement recently. We systematically evaluated evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as to whether screening decreases mortality from diseases where death is a common outcome.We selected 19 diseases (39 tests) out of 50 diseases/disorders for which USPSTF provides screening evaluation. Screening is recommended for 6 diseases (12 tests) out of the 19. Among the results of the meta-analyses, reductions where the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) excluded the null occurred for NO DISEASES FOR ALL-CAUSE mortality estimates . Among individual RCTs, reductions in disease-specific and all-cause mortality where the 95% CIs excluded the null occurred in 30% and 11% of the estimates, respectively. CONCLUSIONS:Among currently available screening tests for diseases where death is a common outcome, reductions in disease-specific mortality are uncommon and reductions in all-cause mortality are very rare or non-existent.
Thus the $trillion screening mammo war by the Disease Industry on healthy breasts to create and find as much silent precancer as possible to profiteer burn and cut hots up. Its about ethics- that women are made anxious about the necessity (usually none) for screening and the harms understated:
Germany (like Switzerland, Scandinavia,
Canada and USA) also has grave doubts.
with some good Forum comments that follow:
September 16, 2014 — A U.K. clinical trial examining whether mammography screening should be offered to a broader range of women must be halted due to ethical and medical concerns, according to a letter published in BMJ by a group of longtime opponents to breast screening. But not everyone agrees, and the controversy looks set to continue. In a strongly worded letter published (BMJ) on 16 September, a group led by Dr. Susan Bewley raised concerns about the U.K. age-extension trial, which is examining whether the age range for screening should be extended to both younger and older women. They challenge the design of the trial as well as the qualifications of its chief investigator, calling the study an “out of control trial with ineffective oversight.”“Our concerns relate to the science and ethics of this trial. Women should always be told the full facts — here they are unwittingly participating in a research trial without fully realizing that the harm/benefit ratio is uncertain,” Bewley said. “There is no overall mortality benefit from breast screening at any age if you look at the Nordic Cochrane review — only a reduction in breast cancer mortality.”
NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE: Table 3. Estimated Benefits and Harms of Mammography Screening for 10,000 Women Who Undergo Annual Screening Mammography Over a 10-Year Period:
| Age, y |
No. of Breast Cancer Deaths Averted With Mammography Screening Over Next 15 y |
No. (95% CI) With ≥1 False-Positive Result During the 10 yc |
No. (95% CI) With ≥1 False Positive Resulting in a Biopsy During the 10 yc |
No. of Breast Cancers or DCIS Diagnosed During the 10 y That Would Never Become Clinically Important (Overdiagnosis)d |
| 40 |
1–16 |
6,130 (5,940–6,310) |
700 (610–780) |
?–104e |
| 50 |
3–32 |
6,130 (5,800–6,470) |
940 (740–1,150) |
30–137 |
| 60 |
5–49 |
4,970 (4,780–5,150) |
980 (840–1,130) |
64–194 |
Invisible Risks, Emotional Choices — Mammography and Medical Decision Making Lisa Rosenbaum, M.D. cardiologist & journalist N Engl J Med October 16, 2014: in 1993, frightened New York City parents agitated for asbestos removal from schools. As often occurs, public fear trumped expert risk assessment; the parents’ demands were met, the victory was celebrated, but then the celebration crashed. It turned out that removing the asbestos would mean closing the schools for weeks, disrupting parents’ lives. “As the costs of the removal came on-screen,” writes behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, “parents thought much more like experts, and the risks of asbestos seemed tolerable: Statistically small, and on balance worth incurring.”1
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It is partly because our perceptions of risk are so influenced by our changeable emotions that we turn to experts to perform cost–benefit analyses. From environmental regulations to nuclear energy, such expert assessments inform policies meant to improve public health and welfare. We would not ask airline passengers to create standards for aviation safety or car owners to optimize fuel-emission standards, and in medicine, too, we still depend on expert-generated guidelines. Increasingly, however, in this era of patient-centered care and shared decision making, those guidelines emphasize the role that patient preference should play in the weighing of risk and benefit for any given evidence-based recommendation. This approach, with virtue on its side, is driven by the aspiration that we can, with the proper tools, empower patients to think like experts. But can we?
Many medical decisions involve considerable uncertainty and complex tradeoffs, but none seem to highlight the tension between emotions and risk assessment more than mammography screening. Although the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommended in 2009 that women under 50 years of age not undergo routine mammography screening, and that those between 50 and 75 years of age be screened less frequently, screening rates have apparently held steady or perhaps even increased. There are many possible reasons for this trend: physicians’ habits, conflicting guidelines, medicolegal concerns, radiologists’ preference for the status quo, and the mandating of screening coverage for women of all ages in the Affordable Care Act. But I suspect that the trends also reflect the powerful role that emotions play in both reinforcing women’s commitment to screening and the challenge of communicating the potential harms of mammography.
Consider a discussion with a 45-year-old woman with no family history of breast cancer about the most likely harm of screening: a false positive result. Maybe you say, “For someone like you, there is around a 50% chance that if you have regular screening over the next 10 years, you will have a false positive result. That could lead to repeat testing, potentially including a biopsy, and lots of worry and anxiety.”2 But though doctors striving to reduce unnecessary testing tend to emphasize the psychological stress involved, this possibility does not seem to loom large for women facing this decision.
Perhaps these results reflect the likelihood that, when facing tough tradeoffs, we anticipate and try to avoid regret, rather than anxiety. Despite the demonstrable harms on the population level, cancer screening rarely begets regret for the individual. As Ransohoff and colleagues have written about the persistence of prostate-cancer screening, “the screening process is one without negative feedback. A negative test provides reassurance. A positive one is accompanied by gratitude that disease was caught early. And a false positive test, regardless of the distress it may cause, is nevertheless followed by relief that no cancer was ultimately found.”5 So women who have had false positive mammograms may spend the rest of their lives worrying that they are at heightened risk for breast cancer. But they are not left with regret about having had the test in the first place.
What about the risk of overdiagnosis — being diagnosed with and treated for a tumor that would never have become clinically significant? The potential toxic effects of treatments, ranging from chemotherapy and radiation to lumpectomy and mastectomy, make overdiagnosis the greatest potential harm of mammography screening. Though overdiagnosis has been notoriously difficult to quantify, a recent analysis of data on mammography screening over the past 30 years suggests that of all breast cancers diagnosed, 22 to 31% are overdiagnosed.6 Nevertheless, there are few risks of this magnitude that are more “off-screen” than overdiagnosis.
The first challenge in conveying this risk to women is that many are simply unaware that overdiagnosis occurs. One survey showed that only 7% of women believed that there could be tumors that grow so slowly that an affected woman would need no treatment; another study showed that women found the concept confusing even after a brief educational intervention. After being educated, women thought the information should be considered in decision making, but most believed it would not affect their own intent to be screened.3,7
This disconnect between awareness and intent speaks to the fundamental challenge of conveying the potential harms of mammography screening. That is: we do not think risk; we feel it. As research on risk perception has shown, we are often guided by intuition and affect.8 For example, when our general impressions of a technology are positive, we tend to assume that its benefits are high and its risks are low. We estimate our personal risks of disease not on the basis of algorithms and risk calculators, but rather according to how similar we are, in ways we can observe, to people we know who have the disease. And when we fear something, we are far more sensitive to the mere possibility of its occurrence than its actual probability.
That may be why overdiagnosis does not resonate emotionally. We do not see women walking around with “an overdiagnosis.” Instead, we see breast-cancer survivors. We do not hear people complaining about having endured radiation, chemotherapy, and a lumpectomy. What we hear instead is, “Thank goodness I had a mammogram and caught it early.” Our relatives do not eye us critically when we get a mammogram that reveals a nascent tumor. But people shake their heads and say, “I wish she had taken better care of herself,” when we are diagnosed after not having been screened. Thus, we can be educated about overdiagnosis. We can refine our estimates about its likelihood and incorporate them into our recommendations, as the USPSTF did in 2009. But it is hard to summon fear of a risk that remains invisible.
So how do we balance the goal of engaging women in decision making with the reality that emotions play a powerful role in shaping our understanding of benefit and risk? Some experts emphasize the need to address sources of misperception that inform beliefs far outside clinical encounters. Researchers at Dartmouth, for example, have described the misleading nature of various screening-advocacy campaigns. One advertisement by the Komen Foundation, for instance, features a photo of a beautiful young woman, with a caption reading, “The 5-year survival rate for breast cancer when caught early is 98%. When it’s not? 23%.”9 Though 5-year survival rates, because of lead-time bias and overdiagnosis, do not actually tell you whether the test saves lives, the visceral appeal of “catching something early” easily eclipses the difficult mental calculations one must undertake to figure out why early detection does not necessarily mean living longer.
The problem is that once impressions have formed, whatever their source, educational efforts to address misperceptions often fail and can even backfire. In a recent randomized trial evaluating approaches to vaccine education, for example, researchers found that, among parents least likely to vaccinate their children, exposure to information emphasizing that there is no link between vaccines and autism mitigated misperceptions but nevertheless further reduced their intention to vaccinate.10 Indeed, the fact that sound scientific information that challenges beliefs can simply intensify those beliefs has been recognized by cognitive psychologists for decades. What was more disappointing in this study was that more creative attempts to engage parents emotionally, such as using images or narratives of children dying of measles, not only failed to increase vaccination intent but also cemented some parents’ conviction that there is a link between vaccines and autism.
If there is tension between belief and sound medical information regarding vaccines, for which the benefits so clearly outweigh the risks, the tension is only heightened for decisions with more complex tradeoffs. The vaccine study thus raises two key challenges for the profession.
The first is empirical. As the locus of decision making shifts toward the patient, this study reminds us how little we know about how beliefs inform interpretation of medical evidence — or about how to negotiate those beliefs in pursuit of better health. Closing this empirical gap is daunting. Not only does each person have his or her own belief system, but the particular beliefs that are relevant for a decision regarding, say, elective percutaneous coronary intervention or palliative chemotherapy may be quite different from those relevant to childhood vaccination or mammography screening. Moreover, even though it is more practical and financially feasible to conduct a study that looks at how interventions affect knowledge and intent, what we really need are long-term studies of how new approaches to sharing information affect downstream behaviors and outcomes.
Which brings us to the second challenge, more ethical than empirical: How do we balance the need to honor preferences and values with the imperative to translate our evidence base into better population health? Our current default, particularly since medical recommendations are increasingly debated publicly, is to emphasize that decisions are “personal.” After the 2009 guidelines were published, the Obama administration and many physician leaders were all over the news reminding us of the importance of personal preferences. But even as more data accrue, including a recent review suggesting that the harms of mammography are greater than we once thought and the benefits fewer,11 the message we hear is not “Let’s do fewer mammograms.” Rather, it is “Let’s honor patients’ preferences.”
Though we certainly need to be sensitive to patients’ values, it is often hard to distinguish values from an emotional understanding of risk. Consider the decision to initiate statin therapy for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. One patient, an avid tennis player, may recognize the potential for improved cardiovascular health but feel that the prospect of myalgias simply outweighs any potential benefit. That is a preference. Another patient hates drug companies and therefore believes that statins must lack cardiovascular benefit and be highly likely to cause myalgias and liver disease. That is an emotional understanding of risk. Both patients arrive at the same choice, but should we really celebrate them as equally informed decisions?
The tangled nature of emotions and values is particularly relevant to mammography screening, as evidenced in qualitative research done since the 2009 guidelines were released. One study explored the beliefs and attitudes of an ethnically diverse sample of women in their 40s. Though many were unaware of the guidelines, the researchers found that educating them about the new recommendations strengthened rather than diminished their commitment to screening. Women also expressed fears that the guidelines were an attempt by insurers to save money and keep them from getting the care they needed. Many women, expressing their abiding conviction that mammograms save lives, said they would have “no use” for a decision aid and viewed the weighing of benefits and harms as “irrelevant.” In fact, many said they wanted to be screened more than once a year and beginning before the age of 40 years. Finally, many believed that it was unjust that laywomen had been left out of the guideline-development process and the weighing of potential benefits and harms that it entailed.12
Such responses echo a broader debate among leading scholars of risk perception about whom we should rely on to evaluate risk. Some, such as Sunstein,1 recognizing our general difficulties in thinking about probabilities, argue that this task ought to be left to experts who can create policies to maximize public welfare. But the psychologist Paul Slovic has argued that the very concept of risk is subjective. Whereas experts tend to conceive of risk as “synonymous with expected annual mortality,” Slovic reminds us that riskiness means more to people than mortality rates.13
Undoubtedly, the recognition of the affective nature of risk perception is critical to the physician’s role in helping patients live longer, higher-quality lives. But even if we can, in some general way, address misleading statistics that drive inflated perceptions of the benefits of mammography, what do we do about the 38-year-old woman who insists on annual screening because she just lost her best friend to breast cancer? Or the 43-year-old with fibrocystic breasts who last year had a false positive mammogram and is now convinced her risk is even higher? Is there some hierarchy of emotional reasoning dictating that certain causes of heightened fears are more acceptable than others? Or because we know it is often impossible to tease out sources of belief, much less rank them, is a better approach the more paternalistic one: definitive guidelines on which physicians base their recommendations, with less emphasis on the role that patient preference ought to play?
One of the hallmarks of heuristic reasoning, as emphasized by Daniel Kahneman,14 is that faced with a hard question, we answer an easier one instead. In some sense, then, as a profession, we have fallen into a collective heuristic trap. Rather than confront these thorny ethical questions head on, we have answered an easier question: Should we respect patients’ values and preferences? The right answer will always be yes. The much harder question is how to balance that respect with our professional responsibility to use our expertise to translate clinical science into better population health.
Defaulting to patient preference in the face of uncertainty has become the moral high ground. But it is as much our job to figure out how to best help our patients lead healthier lives as it is to honor their preferences. No matter how well we can define the tradeoffs of a medical decision, the threshold at which we decide that benefits outweigh harms is as subjective as individual patients’ perceptions of those tradeoffs. But this recognition does not stop us from making rigorous attempts to quantify the tradeoffs, any more than it should stop us from trying to better understand how our patients’ feelings and beliefs inform their understanding of those numbers, consequent behaviors, and health outcomes. As Slovic has emphasized, experts’ efforts to communicate risk will fail in the absence of a structured two-way process. “Each side, expert and public, has something valid to contribute,” he notes. “Each side must respect the insights and intelligence of the other.”13
update 21 Oct 2014 Dr Garry Gordon writes :
“Hello , What are you doing to detox your patients on a daily basis? We live in a crazy world where nutritional supplements with little or no clear risks to consumers are seized/ restricted, but Authorities drag feet on stopping the use of a proven toxin like BP-A found as a coating inside of most canned goods. Please understand that Randy Jirtle at Duke has shown that BP-A made healthy brown Agouti mice become obese, yellow and diabetic! That effect led to an epigenetic change, which will persist for generations and was shown to be an epigenetic change in methylation.Plan to protect yourself with lots of methylation support. I take my Beyond B12 sublingual product that provides Methyl Folate and Methyl B12. Please know virtually everyone tests positive for BP-A in urine much of the time, as we have great difficulty in avoiding this poison in our daily living. Yet authorities ignores the dangers although they finally are doing something to protect babies a little.How can anyone practice effective medicine today and ignore the toxin burden we all carry. Remember when I got out of training in 1958 normal sperm count was 140 million; today few have 40 million. I detox daily with my “Power Drink” and PEMF and I definitely show real benefits even at age 79.“BPA has been linked to possible health problems of the brain, breast and prostate. In 2008, the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council asked the FDA to ban use of the chemical because of what it termed “serious adverse health effects.”In 2011, the American Medical Association deemed BPA an “endocrine-disrupting agent” and urged that “BPA-containing products with the potential for human exposure be clearly identified.” The FDA said it continues to evaluate the safety of BPA-containing products.”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578600113164806902.html?mod=djemHL_t
Wassertheil-Smoller S ea . Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY, write in
Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2013 Oct;141(3):495-505.
Multivitamin and mineral use and breast cancer mortality in older women with invasive breast cancer in the women’s health initiative..
“Multivitamin use is common in the United States. It is not known whether multivitamins with minerals supplements (MVM) used by women already diagnosed with invasive breast cancer would affect their breast cancer mortality risk. a prospective cohort study of 7,728 women aged 50-79 at enrollment in the women’s health initiative (WHI) in 40 clinical sites across the United States diagnosed with incident invasive breast cancer during WHI and followed for a mean of 7.1 years after breast cancer diagnosis, showed :” At baseline, 37.8 % of women reported MVM use. After mean post-diagnosis follow-up of 7.1 ± 4.1 (SD) years, there were 518 (6.7 %) deaths from breast cancer. In adjusted analyses, breast cancer mortality was 30 % lower in MVM users as compared to non-users (HR = 0.70; 95 % CI 0.55, 0.91). This association was highly robust and persisted after multiple adjustments for potential confounding variables and in propensity score matched analysis (HR = 0.76; 95 % CI 0.60-0.96). Postmenopausal women with invasive breast cancer using MVM had lower breast cancer mortality than non-users. The results suggest a possible role for daily MVM use in attenuating breast cancer mortality in women with invasive breast cancer but the findings require confirmation.
Tying up Garry Gordon’s two themes above is obviously the fact that , as in eg the USA ARED (Centrum) trial, the Lemon-Rollo McMaster supermouse trials and the Scottish Highlands, and China supplement trials, multisupplements are longterm (especially with vigorous levels of vitamins C and D and magnesium) both antioxidant, insulin sensitizing, methylating, Nitric-oxide promoting and (heavy metal) detoxicants- ie promote healthspan and suppress degenerative diseases and infection. . .
UPDATE 18 OCT 2014: more arguments against screening mammography from UK and Canada:Curr Oncol. Oct 2014; 21(5): 210–214. Reflections on screening mammography and the early detection of breast cancer. A Countercurrents Seriesa S.A. Narod, MD *Women’s College Research Institute, Women’s College Hospital, Toronto, ON.A little learning is a dangerous thing.— Alexander Pope, An Essay on CriticismIn the stormy aftermath of the recent publication of results from the 25-year Canadian National Breast Screening Study (nbss)1, various opinions questioning the validity of the study’s results have been expressed2–7. I was a latecomer to the study. In 2005, I was charged with oversight of the final record linkage and the statistical analysis and interpretation of the final data set. Dr. Anthony Miller has been my mentor since 1987. Our first joint paper, on screening for cervical cancer, was published in 19918. I chose not to respond to individual criticisms, but instead to collect my thoughts and to try to explain why the study authors saw no benefit from screening.Most of the criticism from the radiology community focuses on issues of study design (which they claim was inadequate) and on the quality of the mammography (which they also claim was inadequate). Cancer survivors bolster those criticisms with testimonials and appeals to common sense. Supporters of the study are drawn from the public health community, and they tend to focus on overdiagnosis and health economics.The report at issue is not the first emerging from the nbss. Earlier reports9,10 were criticized for not having allowed adequate follow-up time. But the 25-year results resemble the early results, and the authors are no longer criticized for premature disclosure. None of the first-generation critics have acknowledged the consistency; instead, they look elsewhere and point out other weaknesses. They claim that high-risk women were assigned to the mammography arm in violation of the principle of randomization. In his bestseller The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee says, as a matter of fact, that high-risk women were assigned surreptitiously to the mammography arm, which explains the lack of observed benefit11.The most recent nbss report1 tallied the breast cancers that occurred in each of the two study arms after the screening period ended (that is, between years 6 and 25), counting 2584 cancers in the screening arm and 2609 cancers in the control arm. If the screening arm had been enriched for women at “high risk,” that enrichment must have been performed in a peculiar fashion, using only risk factors that have a transient effect. Perhaps Dr. Mukherjee would care to explain what those factors were. It follows that the excess of cancers seen in the screening period (years 1–5: 666 vs. 524) was a result of early diagnosis and not from stacking the deck.In any case, compelling evidence against the criticism of assignment of high-risk women to the screening arm is provided in the most recent analysis1, and that criticism is no longer raised (although no one has retracted or apologized). Instead, critics now insist that many women with palpable lesions were sent directly to the screening arm by duplicitous research assistants. There is no reason to believe that such actions (which would involve a national conspiracy of dozens of coordinators who spoke two official languages) were taken, but even if they had been, the study and its conclusions would not necessarily be invalidated. Even if all the women with prevalent cancers had been shunted to the screening arm, the situation could still be remedied by ignoring all cancers found at the first screening round (prevalent cancers) and focusing instead on the incident cancers. Such a strategy is not uncommon in screening studies. In the nbss, no woman had the opportunity to “cross the floor” from one study arm to the other after initial assignment. Therefore, if we exclude all prevalent cases from the analysis and focus on women with no cancer at study entry, we can re-evaluate the benefit of mammography thereafter. The hazard ratio for death from breast cancers detected in screening rounds 2–5 was 0.90 (95% confidence interval: 0.69 to 1.16;p = 0.40).But what about crossover? It is claimed that a certain proportion of the women in the control arm—perhaps as high as 20%—opted for screening off-study, in particular after the screening period was over. That crossover will, some say, eclipse a benefit of screening that might otherwise have ensued. That is, the benefit of mammography (which might well have been substantial) was nullified by a subcohort of independently-minded women who went for mammography at the end of the 5 years. That speculation is fanciful, but if true, should be welcomed, because it can now be said to a patient who, at age 40, requests a mammogram, that there is no hurry; she can come back in 5 years for a mammogram and achieve the same net benefit. And when she comes back at age 45, she can be reprieved again until age 50.Crossover is a form of contamination that results in misclassification of the exposed and unexposed groups. In a trial, it will tend to bias the result toward the null. The best way to avoid misclassification is to randomize the patients after they agree to participate—as the nbss did. In contrast, in the Swedish two-county trial (discussed in more detail a little later in this article), the subjects were randomized by intention-to-treat—that is, by whether they received or did not receive an invitation to mammography12–15. Of the 78,085 women in Sweden who were offered screening, 69,645 accepted and 8440 declined. In effect, then, 8440 women in the Swedish study were de facto misclassified (versus an undisclosed number of hypothetical crossers-over in the Canadian study). The proponents of the Swedish study do not see that misclassification as a shortcoming, but instead use it to buoy their argument in favour of screening. They say that if everybody invited for screening came for screening, then the protective effect would have been more profound. In the Swedish study, all women in the control group were offered a screening test after the screening period ended (a reasonable thing to do); but those authors were not criticized for “contaminating” their study.
The second issue raised concerns the quality of the mammography. After all, the nbss tests were completed 30 years ago using 30-year-old technology. I still wonder how things might have been done differently. Mammography screening identified 212 women with breast cancer who would otherwise have been missed. They had cancers that were, on average, 1.4 cm in size, with 67% being node-negative. The survival of those women was very good. At the end of the study period, 170 women with a nonpalpable mammography-detected breast cancer were alive or had died of other causes. How many of those lives did screening save? Fifty? Twenty-five? Ten? Unfortunately, all we can say is that the number was too few to be noticed. If a significant number of those 170 lives had, in fact, been saved, surely the difference between study arms would have been noticeable. Breast cancer deaths numbered 180 in the mammography group and 171 in the control group. Perhaps some of the survivors believe that their lives were saved. They might perhaps have written a letter to the editor of their local newspaper extolling the virtues of mammography. But 42 women with a nonpalpable mammography-detected cancer died (none of whom has written a letter to the editor).
I am also among the authors of several publications on the benefits of screening by magnetic resonance imaging (mri) in high-risk women16–18. Those studies were greeted as successes, given that they demonstrated how, with the use of mri, breast cancers could be downstaged. Those studies were accepted by the radiology community as being supportive of screening. Whether mri reduces mortality has not yet been shown. I cannot predict whether mri screening will be effective in reducing mortality 10 years down the line, but I fully expect that if a mortality benefit fails to materialize, the studies will be criticized for using 30-year-old equipment and a poor study design.
Much of the criticism of the nbss has come from Drs. Daniel Kopans and László Tabár, and fellow travellers such as Siddhartha Mukherjee and Patrick Borgen2–7,11. They use the Swedish two-county trial as evidence of a good study that supports the use of mammography and quote a 30% reduction in mortality. Naturally, they do not criticize their canonical study, but it is time to take a closer look.
In the nbss, women were randomized on an individual basis after they had attended the study centre. The result was two groups of equal size and 100% compliance with the first screen. In Sweden, the two counties were divided into 19 geographic strata that were then divided into either 2 blocks (Östergötland) or 3 blocks (Kopparberg). The resulting 45 blocks were randomized, and women in more than half the blocks were sent a letter of invitation to screening. Of the 59% of women who received an invitation, 89% came for the first screen and 83% came for the second screen14.
The Canadian women were offered 5 mammograms 1 year apart. The Swedish women were offered mammograms every 2 years (ages 40–49) or every 3 years (ages 50–74) for up to 8 years. They underwent fewer screens (Table i). The cancers detected by mammography in Canada were similar in size to those detected in Sweden (Table i), but the size of the cancers occurring in the control group were very different. Those comparisons suggest that physical examinations or breast cancer awareness (or both) were important contributors to the size of cancers detected in Canada. A diminution of cancer mortality would not be expected to be associated with a 0.2 cm mean difference in tumour size, but might be expected with a net reduction of 0.7 cm in size19. Of the cancers detected in the screening arm of the Canadian trial, 68% were palpable. That fact has been a source of criticism. But a physical examination was not conducted as part of the screening protocol in Sweden, and the comparable number of palpable tumours was not given. Therefore, given the much longer mean time between screening visits in Sweden, and the high proportion of women in the screening arm that were never screened, I estimate that between 70% and 80% of the cancers in the mammography arm in Sweden would have been palpable and could have been detected by physical examination—had it been done. The fact that the relevant number is not given is a critical lapse. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that 100% of the cancers detected in the screening arm in Sweden were in fact palpable (not a gross exaggeration). What then would be the point of mammographic screening? And if that number (the palpable fraction) is not available, how can the results be judged? Neither the Swedish nor the Canadian trial can exclude the possibility that the benefit from invitation to mammography might have been restricted to women with palpable cancers.
A comparison of key parameters in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study (nbss) and the Swedish two-county trial
The Canadian study reports the number of cancers detected in the follow-up period after the end of the screening period and the number of subsequent deaths from breast cancer. From year 6 to year 25, 2584 incident cancers occurred in the screening group, resulting in 298 deaths (11.5%), and 2609 incident cancers occurred in the control group, resulting in 321 deaths (12.3%). Those data are important because they confirm that, in the absence of screening, the cancer incidence and mortality are equal in the study groups. Where are the comparable numbers for the Swedish study? Again, they are not given. But in looking at the extraordinary Figure 1 from the most recent report of the Swedish study12, the mortality curves are seen to continue to separate at 25 to 29 years after the initiation of screening, and long since screening had stopped.
Tabár and colleagues ask readers to believe that the benefits of mammography are everlasting (or at least for 20 years beyond the end of screening). They make that claim despite having no surety about whether the deaths from breast cancer in years 25–29 were the result of cancers diagnosed during the screening period or diagnosed after screening had stopped. They claim that most of the deaths from breast cancers diagnosed in the control arm occurred more than 10 years after diagnosis. Thus, the reader is asked to accept that a mean of 2.3 mammograms obtained in year 1–7 are more likely than a baseline imbalance in breast cancer risk to lead to a reduction in breast cancer mortality of 30% in years 25–29!
The incidence and mortality rates corresponding to cancers that were diagnosed after the screening trial was stopped are unavailable. Seeing the survival curves corresponding to cases detected in the screened and unscreened cohorts would be interesting. In the nbss, most cancer deaths occurred, as expected, within 10 years from diagnosis1. When the nbss was challenged as to having achieved an even balance in the study groups, the authors provided the relevant data. The Swedish authors should do the same. Patrick Borgen has stated that the nbss is the “worst clinical trial ever done”5—an extraordinary statement. Either he has devoted his life to poring over medical tracts with the zeal of a Talmudic scholar, or he is speaking nonsense. But refuting his claim is easy: it takes merely the time required to read the Swedish papers.
Once the facts are accepted (that screening mammography fails to do what it was intended to do, and that overdiagnosis is real and substantial), then the most interesting questions can begin to be addressed. Did the nbss fail because mammography is not a sufficiently sensitive imaging technique? Or has the screening community been working under false premises?
Consider sensitivity. Proponents of mammography say that the technique is currently better than it was in the 1980s, largely because it is more sensitive. (Specificity is also important, but is not at issue here.) They argue that “the more sensitive, the better.” The earlier a cancer can be identified and managed, the better. The smaller, the better. But those contentions generate an interesting paradox. Consider a woman with a small early-stage breast cancer. The recommendation is that this woman be followed with annual bilateral mammography for 5 or more years to identify recurrences and contralateral cancers20. That recommendation is based on the knowledge that the risk of contralateral cancer is between 0.5% and 0.8% annually21 and that a diagnosis of contralateral cancer is associated with an increase in mortality from breast cancer22. (It has not been shown that screening for contralateral cancer reduces mortality.) But mri is a much more sensitive screening tool than mammography, and by using mri in that setting, a small contralateral breast cancer can be identified in 4% of women with newly-diagnosed breast cancer23. And yet routine mri of the contralateral breast is not recommended, because it has not been shown to improve survival. Instead, the recommendation for follow-up with annual mammography continues. The paradox is this: If 8 years’ worth of incident breast cancers can be identified in one shot, why bother to pick them up in dribs and drabs? The mri-detected occult lesions are understood not to be clinically meaningful because they do not adversely affect mortality (overdiagnosis); however, if a similar lesion were to be found as a primary cancer in the ipsilateral breast, the radiologists insist that it is clinically meaningful. Once the paradigm that an increase in sensitivity increases overdiagnosis is accepted (that is, not all lesions are clinically meaningful), then it is the responsibility of clinicians to try to determine the ideal level of sensitivity.
The nbss has been berated for working with 30-year-old machinery, but I think that the greater problem is that clinicians are still working under 30-year-old assumptions. How much is really known about the relationship between size and survival? How confident is our community about early detection? It is universally accepted that tumour size and survival are inversely related for women diagnosed with palpable breast cancer24. That understanding is the rationale for early detection by mammography or other means. But it does not logically follow that a decrease in tumour size will necessarily lead to a decrease in mortality.
Consider two analogous situations. First, among women with breast cancer who experience a local recurrence, the strongest predictor of death is a short time from diagnosis to local recurrence25. However, that finding does not imply that a further shortening of the time from diagnosis to recurrence through intensive imaging would worsen survival. Second, studies of children with neuroblastoma noted that the children diagnosed in the first year of life experienced much better survival than those diagnosed thereafter26. That observation encouraged physicians to consider that screening for neuroblastoma by measuring urinary metabolites would increase the proportion of children diagnosed in the first year and thereby reduce mortality. The resulting clinical trial unfortunately found no benefit27. Neuroblastoma with a favorable prognosis is detectable by screening, but those cases are associated with a very high rate of spontaneous regression or maturation of the neuroblastoma into benign ganglioneuroma. Very few cases of neuroblastoma detected by screening have unfavourable biologic features such as N-Myc amplification28.
The relationship between breast cancer size and survival is not fixed, and the slope of the curve that defines the relationship varies according to the stage and pathologic features of the breast cancer24. The strongest relationship is seen with large cancers and node-positive cancers29. The relationship is attenuated among women with triple-negative cancers, with her2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2)–positive cancers, and with BRCA1-positive cancers19,30. Size does not predict mortality well for women with nonpalpable cancers29. Is it possible that there are additional categories wherein the size–survival relationship does not hold, and that eventually every woman with breast cancer will be able to be assigned to one of those categories? If more specific categorization were to be possible, then there would be no expectation of benefit from early detection—through mammography or any other means. In statistical terms, the question is “Are there variables n1, n2, n3, … nx, such that, after adjusting for n1, n2, n3, … nx in a follow-up study, size is no longer predictive of survival?” For example, in a study of 5423 women with cancers of less than 2.0 cm, tumour size was not predictive of survival after adjustment for grade, hormone receptor status, and her2 expression30. Those data suggest that, as the mean size of breast cancers in a population diminishes, further reductions in size can achieve only marginally less benefit. The lesson of mammography should be used to rethink the fundamentals of breast cancer and its natural history so that planning can commence for the experiments and clinical studies that will lead to better outcomes in the future.
Curr Oncol. Oct 2014; 21(5): 215–216. re: Reflections on screening mammography and the early detection of breast cancer Baum, MD ChM* *Professor Emeritus of Surgery & Medical Humanities, University College, London, U.K.
I welcome this opportunity to comment on the piece by Dr. Steven Narod in this issue of Current Oncology. His commentary systematically responds to, and rebuts, the near-hysterical reactions to the recent publication of the 25-year follow-up results of the Canadian National Breast Cancer Screening Study1. I admire his restraint in the face of criticisms that go way beyond the boundaries of polite scientific disputation.
Much of the criticism the authors of the trial have faced goes so far as to accuse them of being guilty of scientific misconduct and fraud. Those charges are libellous, but I’m sure that Narod et al. are wise enough not to resolve their differences in a court of law, but simply to open their books to scientific scrutiny, in a way that fair-minded clinicians can judge who are the real culprits. Narod has achieved precisely that end in his timely and measured response. My only criticism is minor … in that he doesn’t go far enough. For example, it could easily be pointed out that the results of the National Breast Cancer Screening Study sit comfortably within the confidence intervals of a Cochrane Collaboration overview of the screening trials, with no hint of heterogeneity2. If anything, the trial in that overview that is closest to being an outlier is the Swedish two-county trial, whose authors are the shrillest of all the critics3.
The debate is so polarized that, leaving aside possible conflicts of interest, the only assumption that can be made is that the clash is one of ideology rather than scientific discourse. In other words, the true believers in the screening dogma will never be persuaded of the error of their ways by data alone, and so when facts don’t fit their prejudice, they resort to ad hominem attacks.
I was one of those who established the first screening centre in London and South East England in 1988, but as an open-minded clinical scientist, I allowed the emerging new data to change my mind. With all due modesty, that is what is called an expression of scientific integrity. Of course, as Narod points out, the prolonged and futile debate merely inhibits real progress on the subject. The importance of breast screening programs lies not in their success, but in their failure. As Huxley put it, “The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
The national breast screening programs around the world have provided us with a natural experiment of the greatest historical importance, not because of their success in reducing breast cancer mortality, but because of the observations that have emerged concerning overdiagnosis of the disease4,5. About two hundred years ago, cancer was defined by its microscopic appearance. With the discovery and use of the modern microscope, the nineteenth century saw the birth of scientific oncology. Rudolf Virchow, often called the founder of cellular pathology, provided the scientific basis for the modern pathologic study of cancer6. As earlier generations had correlated autopsy findings observed with the unaided eye with the clinical course of cancer one hundred years earlier7, so Virchow correlated the microscopic pathology of the disease. However, the material he was studying came from the autopsies of patients dying from cancer. In the mid-nineteenth century, pathology correlations were performed either on cadavers or on living subjects presenting with locally advanced or metastatic disease who were almost always predetermined to die in the absence of effective therapy. Since then, and without pause for thought, the microscopic identification of cancer according to those classical criteria has been associated with the assumed prognosis of fatal disease in the absence of treatment.
A syllogism at the heart of the diagnosis of cancer therefore runs like this: People frequently die from malignant disease. Under the microscope, this malignant disease has many histologic features that we will call “cancer.” Ergo, anything that looks like “cancer” under the microscope will kill you. The screening debacle therefore suggests that some of the earliest stages of “cancer,” if left unperturbed, will not progress to a disease with lethal potential. Those pathologic entities might have microscopic similarity to true cancers, but their appearances alone are insufficient to predict a life-threatening disease.
Conventional mathematical models of cancer growth are linear or logarithmic—in other words, completely predictable at the outset. They predict transition from in situ phases to early invasive, and from early invasive to late invasive over time. Most natural biologic mechanisms are nonlinear or are better described by chaos theory8. Prolonged latency followed by catastrophe should not be all that surprising. We accept the case for prostate cancer, because we know that most elderly men will die with prostate cancer in situ and not of prostate cancer. In fact, the United Kingdom’s national prostate-specific antigen screening trial (protect) is predicated on that fact, with two a priori outcome measures defined: deaths from prostate cancer, and the number of cancers over-detected and treated unnecessarily9.
Next, it is worth noting that, contrary to all common-sense predictions, the increased detection rate of ductal carcinoma in situ has led to an increase in the mastectomy rate for the screened population4,5. Up to 45% of women with a screen-detected case of ductal carcinoma in situ end up undergoing mastectomy because of the multicentricity of the disease10. And yet the paradox is that clinically detected multicentric invasive breast cancer is relatively uncommon11. Surely that is proof enough that at least half the foci of ductal carcinoma in situ will regress if left alone; of course, determining which half remains the problem.
In conclusion, then, it can be stated with a great deal of conviction that a large proportion (on the order of 50%) of screen-detected (preclinical) foci of breast cancer are not programmed to progress if left unperturbed. That observation is of seismic importance and could set the agenda for breast cancer research into the next decade. The choice to ignore those observations, either because they do not support personal prejudice or because of some sleazy political agenda, will result in our community missing an opportunity of a life-time—and that would be unforgivable.
Narod is to be congratulated for his systematic and robust rebuttal of the unjustified attempts to destroy the credibility of the Canadian trial by a small group of vociferous critics who provide a background noise so loud that it nearly drowns out the true signal of the 25-year experiment of population screening for breast cancer.
“There’s non so blind as those that will not see.”— Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation
Curr Oncol. Oct 2014; 21: 205–207. Screening mammography: the turning of the tide? W.D. Foulkes, MBBS PhD McGill University, Montreal, Quebec This issue of Current Oncology features a Counter-currents article by Dr. Steven Narod, “Reflections on screening mammography and the early detection of breast cancer”1, that is accompanied by a commentary from Professor Michael Baum2 supporting Narod’s thesis. Indeed, in Baum’s view, Narod’s only error was not to push home the point that the Canadian National Breast Cancer Screening Study (nbss) is not an outlier among mammography screening studies. He commends Narod for a measured response to the widespread criticism that followed publication of the 25-year follow-up results of the by now notorious nbss.
It seems as if almost everyone has an opinion on screening mammography. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course; but discussions about mammographic screening tend to take on a special, almost unique, quality—which perhaps speaks to the investments (financial, psychological, and career) made by many of the protagonists, which Professor Baum fleetingly mentions as potential conflicts of interest in his editorial. Baum prefers to see the ongoing debate—if that is what it is—as a clash of ideologies. But what are these ideologies that are so opposed?
Essentially, Baum’s argument is that the proponents of screening are not really scientists, in the sense that they do not accept refutation of data by data. He could be right, but I think the more parsimonious and psychologically more plausible explanation is that the aforementioned investments are simply too great: the stakes are too high. That the stakes are high is, in my view, very clear. Breast cancer is a common disease, and if population-based screening mammography is shown to have failed and is therefore no longer offered, billions of dollars would be saved every year in the United States alone3.
Narod contrasts the results of two large trials of mammography (one carried out in Sweden, the two-county study) with the nbss data. Having read these carefully laid out arguments, I think that most disinterested, but informed, readers will accept that many of the legion of criticisms that have been placed at the door of the nbss simply do not hold up to scrutiny. But mud sticks, and so many observers who do not like the results of the nbss point again and again to the same “flaws.”
One of Narod’s most telling points is that the survival curves for the two arms of the Swedish trial continue to remain separate up to 29 years after the trial was started. That observation is not consistent with any known effect of mammographic screening. It is much more likely that the populations were simply different to start with.
Further discussion of the pros and cons of these two trials is now fairly pointless. There are not much new data to be had, and I can’t see Drs. Kopans and Tabár, on reading Narod’s article, deciding that perhaps the benefits of mammography have, after all, been overestimated. Without new data, we can’t resolve this critical issue. So perhaps we need to stop the current process and actually do some new research to gather the required data.
A recent Perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine4 noted the presence of a deep chasm separating women’s views of the likely benefit of mammographic screening and the actual data available. The nongovernmental Swiss Medical Board subsequently determined that women could not make informed decisions about screening without access to more nuanced information. Moreover, the Board felt that the benefits of mammographic screening were likely to be so small that no new screening programs should be introduced and existing programs should be allowed to run down. Their decision caused the expected uproar, but it is interesting to note that the results of a reader poll after a Clinical Decisions article 2 years earlier in the New England Journal of Medicine5 showed that a clear majority did not think that screening mammography should be started at age 40. Those results are contrary to the recommendation of many breast cancer organizations. But on the basis of these newer findings, it seems to me that the tide has turned, insofar as there are now enough interested parties prepared to question the benefits of mammography.
One of the points that Narod makes bears some discussion: He sees the problem not in terms of 30-year-old mammography machines in nbss study, but in 30-year-old thinking about the biology of breast cancer on the part of those who support screening. Logically, it can be seen that, as breast cancers enlarge, the number of cancer cells within them increases, which can provide opportunities for more malignant clones to emerge. Earlier detection will thus prevent those emerging clones from worsening outcomes. This quasi-Halstedian view, that a breast cancer makes a stately progression through biologically distinct and distinguishable stages and that the grade worsens as the tumour enlarges (assumptions that are at the heart of the original explanation of how mammography “works”6), are no longer part of mainstream thinking about breast cancer biology. Even ductal carcinoma in situ seems to possess many of the molecular changes found in invasive breast cancers, albeit at lower frequencies7,8. It seems as if the “die is cast” fairly early in the life of a breast cancer9. Intrinsic subtypes hold true as cancers grow and metastasize10, and the sojourn time varies from subtype to subtype11. Some breast cancers regress12. Others grow very rapidly13. These are not ideal biologic circumstances for the success of an “across the board” screening program. That conclusion is even borne out by a careful examination of the two-county study data14. The one group for whom screening mammography would be hoped to work—women between 40 and 49 years of age with a grade iii breast cancer (a group likely to contribute disproportionately to the observed mortality from breast cancer)—does not seem to achieve any mortality savings (see Figure 20 in Tabár et al.14). Survival at 16 years from randomization was identical in the invited and screened groups (relative risk: 0.95; 95% confidence interval: 0.55 to 1.64). One wonders if, in fact, the shoe is on the other foot. What has been learned about interpreting screening data from the current understanding of the natural history of breast cancer?
On the other side of the ledger, overdiagnosis has emerged in the past several years as a major issue in breast cancer screening. Quantifying the benefits and harms of mammography make for sobering reading by disinterested parties. If one starts with a sample of 1000 U.S. women 50 years of age, and if those women are screened annually for a decade, fewer than 4 women will avoid a breast cancer death; 3–14 women will suffer the consequences of over-diagnosis; and many hundreds will have at least 1 false alarm15. Work by Welch and Frankel suggests that women would think differently about mammographic screening for breast cancer if they were made aware of those figures at time of invitation for screening. Using best estimates, only 1 woman in 4 who develop a screen-detected breast cancer will avoid a breast cancer death16. The other 3 will do just as well, or just as poorly, without screening—or, of more concern, will have been diagnosed with a cancer that was not destined to ever present clinically. In the observational Norwegian study, only one third of the reduction in deaths from breast cancer could be attributed to mammographic screening per se17. Most women with a screen-detected breast cancer are therefore either diagnosed early (but with no effect on outcome) or are overdiagnosed.
We have been here before. Maureen Roberts, director of the Edinburgh breast screening project, died of breast cancer in 1989. While hopeful that mammographic screening would benefit women, she concluded from an analysis of the Edinburgh trial results that it did not. Before she died, she wrote “Breast screening: time for a rethink?” for the British Medical Journal18, concluding, “I feel sad to be writing this; sad because naturally after so many years I am sorry that breast screening may not be of benefit. I am also sad to seem to be critical of the many dear and valued colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, particularly those who have made such a magnificent contribution to the care and welfare of women with breast cancer. But they will recognise that I am telling the truth.”
It is time to work toward a trial of screening mammography that will incorporate variable thresholds, molecular markers, genetic testing, and psychological and physical measures of the effect of overdiagnosis. One of the two authors of the New England Journal of Medicine Perspective article discussed earlier, an ethics representative on the Swiss Medical Board, has argued that there is a moral requirement for a randomized controlled trial of mammography19 based on Welch’s idea of differing detection thresholds. I believe that women will be interested in such a study. But because almost every major U.S. medical organization focusing on breast cancer prevention, diagnosis, or treatment has stated that women should begin undergoing mammography annually from the age of 40 years, will any agency have the courage to fund it?
October 07, 2014 Dr. Joe Mercola DC does a nice review of recent critiques in
Why So Many Mixed Messages on Mammogram Benefits?
Earlier this year, one of the largest and longest studies of mammography to date — involving 90,000 women followed for 25 years — found that mammograms have no impact on breast cancer mortality. The Canadian Breast Screening Trial ll Miller ea
Over the course of the study, the death rate from breast cancer was virtually identical between those who received an annual mammogram and those who did not, while 22 percent of screen-detected invasive breast cancers were over-diagnosed, leading to unnecessary treatment. The researchers concluded “the data suggest that the value of mammography screening should be reassessed.”2
A Cochrane Collaboration review also found no evidence that mammography screening has an effect on overall mortality, which, taken together, seriously calls into question whether mammography screening really benefits women.3
Public health agencies, however, have been slow to update their recommendations. The American Cancer Society recommends annual mammograms for average-risk women starting at the age of 40, while the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends mammograms every other year starting at age 50
The conflicting recommendations send women mixed messages on whether screening is helpful or harmful, yet, earlier this year the Swiss Medical Board made a clear-cut recommendation: no more systematic mammography.
Why Did the Swiss Medical Board Do Away with Routine Mammograms?
After a year of reviewing the available evidence and its implications, the Swiss Medical Board, an independent health technology assessment initiative, noted they became “increasingly concerned” about what they were finding. The “evidence” simply did not back up the global consensus of other experts in the field suggesting that mammograms were safe and capable of saving lives.
On the contrary, mammography appeared to be preventing only one death for every 1,000 women screened, while causing harm to many more. Their thorough review left them no choice but to recommend that no new systematic mammography screening programs be introduced, and that a time limit should be placed on existing programs.
In their report, made public in February 2014,4 the Swiss Medical Board also advised that the quality of mammography screening should be evaluated and women should be informed, in a “clear and balanced” way, about the benefits and harms of screening.
Unfortunately, many women are still unaware that the science backing the health benefits of mammograms is sorely lacking. Instead of being told the truth, women are guilt-tripped into thinking that skipping their yearly mammogram is the height of medical irresponsibility. It can be hard to stand your ground against such tactics.
When it comes to cancer prevention, however, many doctors are just as confused and manipulated as the average person on the street because of the relentless industry and media propaganda that downplays or ignores research that dramatically contradicts their profit-based agenda.
Five Facts About Mammograms That Every Woman Should Know
Before your next (or first) mammogram, you may be interested to know the following:
1. Mammograms May Offer Less Benefit Than You Think:
In one survey, most women said they believed mammography reduced the risk of breast cancer deaths by at least half and prevented at least 80 deaths per 1,000 women screened.5 In reality, mammography may, at best, offer a relative risk reduction of 20 percent and prevent in absolute terms only onebreast-cancer death per 10,000 women.
2. Mammography May Increase the Risk of Breast Cancer in Women with a BRCA 1/2 Mutation:
Results published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) show that women carrying a specific gene mutation called BRCA1/2 (which is linked to breast cancer) are particularly vulnerable to radiation-induced cancer.6
Women carrying this mutation who were exposed to diagnostic radiation (which includes mammograms) before the age of 30 were twice as likely to develop breast cancer, compared to those who did not have the mutated gene. They also found that the radiation-induced cancer was dose-responsive, meaning the greater the dose, the higher the risk of cancer developing.
3. False Positives are Common (and Dangerous)
In the US, the risk of having a false-positive test over 10 mammograms is a concerning 58 percent to 77 percent!7, 8 When a woman is told she may have breast cancer, it causes considerable anxiety and psychological distress. Meanwhile, you will be subjected to more testing, such as biopsy or surgery, which carry their own set of risks, unnecessarily.
4. Mammograms May Not Work if You Have Dense Breasts
Up to 50 percent of women have dense breast tissue, which makes mammograms very difficult to decipher. Dense breast tissue and cancer both appear white on an X-ray, making it nearly impossible for a radiologist to detect cancer in these women. It’s like trying to find a snowflake in a blizzard.
Breast density laws have been passed in California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Texas, making it mandatory for radiologists to inform their patients who have dense breast tissue that mammograms are basically useless for them. A law is now being considered at a federal level as well.
5. There are Other Screening Options
There are other screening options, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and you have a right to utilize those options. Remember, only a biopsy can confirm cancer. Screening tools only aid in the process of showing concern.
Your Waist Size Is Linked to Your Breast Cancer Risk It’s important to remember that getting a mammogram, if you choose to, is not the same as prevention. In order to truly avoid breast cancer, you need to focus your attention on actual prevention and not just early detection, and one way to do this is by maintaining a healthy weight, and, particularly, a healthy waist size.
Researchers analyzed data from 93,000 mostly overweight post-menopausal women. This included data such as their general health, cancer status, and skirt size (which was used as a gauge of waist size). The latter – skirt size – was strongly linked to breast cancer risk.9 As TIME reported:10
“An increase in skirt size was the single most predictive measure of breast cancer risk, the study concluded. When women went up a single skirt size over a 10-year span between their mid-20s and mid-60s, they were shown to have a 33% greater risk of developing breast cancer after menopause. Buying two skirt sizes up during that same period was linked to a 77% increased risk.”
Clothing sizes can be quite ambiguous, of course, with a size 8 in one brand equal to another’s size 10. Yet, the premise that increasing waist size might increase cancer risk is sound. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, and obese women are thought to be up to 60 percent more likely to develop cancer than those of normal weight.
The reason for this increased risk is because many breast cancers are fueled by estrogen, a hormone produced in your fat tissue. So the more body fat you have, the more estrogen you’re likely to produce. However, excess fat around your mid-section may be particularly dangerous.
Why Your Waist-to-Hip Ratio Matters If you have a high waist-to-hip ratio, i.e. you carry more fat around your waist than on your hips, you may be at an increased risk for certain chronic conditions. Certain body compositions do tend to increase your risk of chronic disease, and carrying extra inches around your midsection has been repeatedly shown to increase cardiovascular health risks. Your waist size is also a powerful indicator of insulin sensitivity, as studies clearly show that measuring your waist size is one of the most powerful ways to predict your risk for diabetes, and this could also play a role in cancer as well.
To calculate your waist-to-hip ratio, measure the circumference of your hips at the widest part, across your buttocks, and your waist at the smallest circumference of your natural waist, just above your belly button. Then divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement to get the ratio. (The University of Maryland offers an online waist-to-hip ratio calculator11 you can use.) To determine your waist-to-hip ratio, get a tape measure and record your waist and hip circumference. Then divide your waist circumference by your hip circumference. For a more thorough demonstration, please review the video below.
| Waist to Hip Ratio |
Men |
Women |
| Ideal |
0.8 |
0.7 |
| Low Risk |
<0.95 |
<0.8 |
| Moderate Risk |
0.96-0.99 |
>0.81 – 0.84 |
| High Risk |
>1.0 |
>0.85 |
The Sugar Connection Obesity, including abdominal obesity, is driving up rates of breast cancer in many developed countries. And what is driving up rates of obesity? Many factors, actually, but sugar certainly plays a primary role. There is no shortage of research linking excessive sugar consumption with obesity, and the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages appears to have a particularly strong link. It was more than five years ago when UCLA researchers found that adults who drank at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day are 27 percent more likely to be overweight or obese.12 Even those who only drank soda occasionally had a 15 percent greater risk.
This is far more than simply an issue of consuming “empty calories,” as sugary drinks, soda, and even fresh-squeezed fruit juice contain fructose, which has been identified as one of the primary culprits in the meteoric rise of obesity and related health problems—in large part due to its ability to turn on your “fat switch.” Alarmingly, research presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 Scientific Sessions suggested sugary beverages are to blame for about 183,000 deaths worldwide each year, including 133,000 diabetes deaths, 44,000 heart disease deaths, and 6,000 cancer deaths.
About 77 percent of food items in US grocery stores contain added sugar. So it’s no wonder that, while the American Heart Association recommends a daily sugar limit of six teaspoons for women and nine for men, the average American consumes more like 22. If health agencies really wanted to make a dent in breast cancer, they would focus on sharing the truth about sugar (and grains), and their role in obesity and cancer. Unfortunately, breast cancer is big business, and mammography is one of its primary profit centers. This is why the industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep it, even if it means ignoring (or downplaying) the truth.
Avoiding Sugar and Other Top Breast Cancer Prevention Tips I believe the vast majority of all cancers, including breast cancer, could be prevented by strictly applying basic, commonsense healthy lifestyle strategies, such as the ones below. No available screening method, whether mammography or otherwise, is going to lower your risk of breast cancer… but the tips that follow will:
-
- Avoid sugar, especially fructose, and processed foods. All forms of sugar are detrimental to your health in general and tend to promote cancer. Refined fructose, however, is clearly one of the most harmful and should be avoided as much as possible. This automatically means avoiding processed foods, as most are loaded with fructose.
- Optimize your vitamin D levels. Vitamin D influences virtually every cell in your body and is one of nature’s most potent cancer fighters. Vitamin D is actually able to enter cancer cells and trigger apoptosis (programmed cell death). If you have cancer, your vitamin D level should probably be between 70 and 100 ng/ml. Vitamin D works synergistically with every cancer treatment I’m aware of, with no adverse effects. Ideally, your levels should reach this point by exposure to the sun or a tanning bed, with oral vitamin D used as a last resort and balanced by other nutrients like vitamin K2 and magnesium.
- Limit your protein. Newer research has emphasized the importance of the mTOR pathways. When these are active cancer growth is accelerated. One way to quiet this pathway is by limiting your protein to one gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass, or roughly a bit less than half a gram of protein per every pound of lean body weight. For most people, this ranges between 40 and 70 grams of protein a day, which is typically about 2/3 to half of what they are currently eating. You can eat 25% more if you are exercising or pregnant.
- Avoid unfermented soy products. Unfermented soy is high in plant estrogens, or phytoestrogens, also known as isoflavones. In some studies, soy appears to work in concert with human estrogen to increase breast cell proliferation, which increases the chances for mutations and drives the phenotype associated with cancer.
- Improve your insulin and leptin receptor sensitivity. The best way to do this is by avoiding sugar and grains and restricting carbs to mostly fiber vegetables. Also make sure you are exercising, especially with Peak Fitness.
- Exercise regularly. One of the primary reasons exercise works to lower your cancer risk is because it drives your insulin levels down, and controlling your insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks. It’s also been suggested that apoptosis (programmed cell death) is triggered by exercise, causing cancer cells to die in the way nature intended. Studies have also found that the number of tumors decrease along with body fat, which may be an additional factor. This is because exercise helps lower your estrogen levels, which explains why exercise appears to be particularly potent against breast cancer.
In addition to exercise, try to limit your sitting time to three hours a day while taking 10,000 daily steps during your non-exercise hours.
- Maintain a healthy body weight. This will come naturally when you begin eating right and exercising. It’s important to lose excess body fat because fat produces estrogen, creating a vicious self-perpetuating cycle.
- Drink a pint to a quart of organic green vegetable juice daily. This is a simple way to get more cancer-fighting nutrients into your diet. Please review my juicing instructions for more detailed information.
- Get plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil. Omega-3 deficiency is a common underlying factor for cancer.
- Curcumin. This is the main active ingredient in turmeric and in high concentrations can be very useful adjunct in the treatment of cancer. It actually has the most evidence-based literature supporting its use against cancer of any nutrient, including vitamin D.13 For example, it has demonstrated major therapeutic potential in preventing breast cancer metastasis.14 It’s important to know that curcumin is generally not absorbed that well, so I’ve provided several absorption tips here. Newer preparations have also started to emerge, offering better absorption. For best results, you’ll want to use a sustained-release preparation.
- Avoid drinking alcohol, or at least limit your alcoholic drinks to one per day.
- Avoid electromagnetic fields as much as possible. Even electric blankets may increase your cancer risk.
- Avoid synthetic hormone replacement therapy, especially if you have risk factors for breast cancer. Many forms of breast cancer are estrogen-fueled, and according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, breast cancer rates for women dropped in tandem with decreased use of hormone replacement therapy. (There are similar risks for younger women who use oral contraceptives. Birth control pills, which are also comprised of synthetic hormones, have been linked to cervical and breast cancers.) If you are experiencing excessive menopausal symptoms, you may want to consider bioidentical hormone replacement therapy instead, which uses hormones that are molecularly identical to the ones your body produces and do not wreak havoc on your system. This is a much safer alternative.
- Avoid BPA, phthalates, and other xenoestrogens. These are estrogen-like compounds that have been linked to increased breast cancer risk.
- Make sure you’re not iodine deficient, as there’s compelling evidence linking iodine deficiency with certain forms of cancer. Dr. David Brownstein, author of the book Iodine: Why You Need It, Why You Can’t Live Without It, is a proponent of iodine for breast cancer. It actually has potent anticancer properties and has been shown to cause cell death in breast and thyroid cancer cells. For more information, I recommend reading Dr. Brownstein’s book. I have been researching iodine for some time ever since I interviewed Dr. Brownstein, as I do believe that the bulk of what he states is spot on. However, I am not at all convinced that his dosage recommendations are correct. I believe they are far too high.
- Avoid charring your meats. Charcoal or flame-broiled meat is linked with increased breast cancer risk. Acrylamide—a carcinogen created when starchy foods are baked, roasted, or fried—has been found to increase cancer risk as well.
27 Sept 2014 Three thoughtful new reviews, from Universities in Australia (Robin Bell), Kuwait (Yusuf Luqmani) and Cape Town (Tim Noakes), highlight the deadly ethical problem of the myth-based zealous profiteering Disease Industry promotion in the well of cancer screening, and the high carbs low fat-low cholesterol diet, and “statin deficiency” – iatrogenic “OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDERS ” that profiteers cultivate in the guileless.
It is not coincidence that the Food and Disease Industry insist that the dangerous high carbs low fat diet they have promoted for the past 40 years, and mass cancer screening for the past >20years , are correct- for the simple perverse reason that such lies pay ie Only Disease Pays. This brings us via
Lupton’s question of Ethics vs Science in the fraught narrow parenting domain, to our everywhere dilemma:
Can Health Science , Human, Animal and plant Rights Survive the Onslaught of ruthless commerce and politics? Breast screening: an obsessive compulsive disorder. in Cancer Causes Control. 2014 Jul 11. Prof Yunus Luqmani a British oncology biochemist, Kuwait University writes “Mammographic screening was founded on the premises that “it saves lives”, ‘early is better than late,’ which prevails in several countries but controversial since its inception. Findings and interpretation of clinical trials data vary considerably, with disagreement on the outcome and value of such procedure, not just about the benefits but about the potential harms of mass screening. Many are being screened for the benefit of the few. Even this might be acceptable but for concern for many women with screen detected cancers that will potentially not cause them harm, and who are very likely receiving unnecessary treatment. Many call for complete cessation of indiscriminate screening if not re-assessment of age and periodicity . Of great concern is that screening is being vigorously advocated by many healthcare workers, the media, and lay persons alike without proper awareness or appreciation of the consequences. Although some National leaflets now present a truer picture, there is distinct lack of transparency to allow women to distinguish perception from reality and to make informed choices. How many would elect to be screened if they knew that for every one woman who is notionally saved by early detection, anywhere from 2 to 10 otherwise healthy women are being turned into breast cancer patients?
Screening mammography – early detection or over-diagnosis Climacteric. 2014 Sep 16:1-7. Epidemiologist
Prof Robin Bell Monash University, Australia
examines benefits and harms of organized screening mammography. Most recent reduction in breast cancer-specific mortality is explained by use of adjuvant therapy rather than screening mammography. Impact of screening mammography in countries where women present with early disease and have access to adjuvant treatment is modest. There is a wide range of estimates for the magnitude of over-diagnosis. All-cause mortality (rather than breast cancer-specific mortality) should be used when assessing impact of screening as otherwise the harm of cancer treatment in those over-diagnosed will be missed. Conclusions The benefits and harms of screening mammography are finely balanced. The impact of screening mammography is at best neutral but may result in overall harm. Women should be informed of the issue of over-diagnosis. It is time to review whether organized mammographic screening programs should continue.
AND ON DIET: It is common cause that humans consume their energy requirements from what they can get- and since animal protein is the most costly, and excess harmful, this means from carbs or fat, of which natural animal/ dairy/ nut fat is the most satisfying. So while keeping energy output and adequate animal protein intake stable, needed energy intake comes from balance of fat and carbs.
A major bone of contention locally is the merits of th
e Banting diet –
in his words, ‘four meals per day, consisting of meat, greens, fruits, and dry wine’- before the age of mass refined and chemically-and genetically-polluted food and maize-fed livestock.
Cereals-carbohydrates in his time 160 years ago were thus largely replaced by fresh meat fats and fresh produce. Considering he was born in 1796, his life of 82 years was almost double the then average lifespan despite his having been severely obese until he found his optimal diet advised by Dr William Harvey based on Professor Claude Bernard’s work on diabetes.
But Banting was a businessman of the pre-automobile era: unlike labourers, you walked, or you saddled up- without tarmac, coaches were slow. With modern understanding of the importance of avoiding the sedentary lifestyle and overload of both alcohol, salt, refined carbohydrates, protein, and synthetic ie transfats (margarine) , the Banting diet has adapted in modern times to be optimal for many people for both energizing and keeping slim and well – with its accent on minimal refined/ processed carbs including concentrated cereals, pure starches, cooked fatty pastries, and commercial fruit juice;
with high natural fat 50+% as the ideal brain-muscle-metabolic energy source- from unprocessed meat, fish, eggs, cream, coconut, butter, cheese; and modest mixed nuts; matched with copious greens and other lowstarch rainbow vegetables.
The futility of low fat (ie high carbs) diet was borne out in the biggest and costliest -$billion – trial ever-
the Women’s Health Initiative WHI, published
in 2006 (Rossouw ea) and for cancer, this week (
Thomson ea) :
“Randomized controlled trial of 48,835 postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years, who participated in the WHI Dietary Modification Trial; randomly assigned to intervention [40%]) or comparison group [60%]) in a free-living setting, enrollment between 1993 and 1998 in 40 US clinical centers; mean follow-up in this analysis was 8.1 years. Intensive behavior modification in group and individual sessions designed to reduce total fat intake to 20% of calories and increase intakes of vegetables/fruits to 5 servings/d and grains to at least 6 servings/d. The comparison group received diet-related education materials. “
Dietary advice to reduce fat for cancer and cardiovascular disease, stroke or coronary heart disease prevention after menopause was not supported in the WHI.
The diet had no effects on incidence of CHD , stroke , or CVD. In fact Women with higher baseline fat intake (quartile) had breast cancer risk only HR-0.76; 0.62, 0.92 during intervention). Thus the highest fat intake lowered breast cancer risk by 24%.
There were no intervention effects ie no benefits of low fat diet on invasive breast 1.08 or colorectal cancer, other cancers, cancer-specific or overall mortality.
and the WHI (
Shikany ea
2006 and
2011 ) further showed
direct association of higher Dietary carbs (glycemic load GL glycemic index) and risk of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease risk factors .
There was a trend toward significance for the positive association between GL and in situ cancers (1.40, 0.94-2.13; P = 0.07). GL inversely associated with high-density lipoprotein HDL cholesterol (P for trend = 0.004) and positively with triglycerides, total cholesterol (P = 0.018) and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.
Professor Tim Noakes Cape Town keeps on pointing out the lack of science in the perverse western (Ancell Keys) paradigm of high carbs low fat processed diet (as in the
WHI) , with futile overreliance on synthetic drugs eg statins, and appliances, surgery to reverse the consequent epidemic degenerative diseases- and keep the medical disease industry profitable. .
This brings us to the cutting edge of modernity:
Can Ethics Survive the Onslaught of Science ? (Prof Michael Lupton, Bond University, Australia 2013)? Can health science survive the onslaught of perverse incentives, profiteering- the Semmelweis Reflex that denies what is cheap, natural and best?
24 Sept 2014 update after the Angela Jolie hype: This month’s JAMA say it all: the less breast surgery the better:
Use of and Mortality After Bilateral Mastectomy Compared With Other Surgical Treatments for Breast Cancer in California, 1998-2011
. Kurian & Gomez Stanford Univ.
JAMA. 2014;312:902-914.
Bilateral mastectomy is increasingly used to treat unilateral breast cancer. Because it may have medical and psychosocial complications, a better understanding of its use and outcomes is essential to optimizing cancer care. Conclusions and Relevance Use of bilateral mastectomy increased significantly throughout California from 1998 through 2011 and with median follow-up of 89 months was not associated with lower mortality than that achieved with breast-conserving surgery plus radiation. Unilateral mastectomy was associated with higher mortality than were the other 2 surgical options.
Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy Is It a Reasonable Option? Editorial|Sept 3, 2014
Lisa Newman, Univ Michigan,
JAMA. 2014;312:895-897
The professional oncology community has worked diligently to generate data that facilitate surgical planning and the decision-making process for patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer. Several lines of evidence support the importance of prioritizing treatment of the known cancer over and above consideration of a risk-reducing mastectomy for the unaffected breast (contralateral prophylactic mastectomy [CPM]). For example, the equivalent overall survival for breast-conserving surgery (BCS) and mastectomy makes CPM an unnecessary option for women who are eligible for lumpectomy and desire breast preservation. Incidence of metachronous contralateral breast cancer (ie, contralateral cancer detected several months after initial breast cancer diagnosis) is relatively low, at 0.25% to 1% per year,1,2 and these cancers are usually detected at early, highly curable stages. Synchronous occult contralateral breast cancer is uncommon, as documented by studies revealing incidental cancer in only 1% to 3% of CPM specimens.3,4 Survival is comparable for patients with unilateral vs metachronous bilateral breast cancer5,6 and typically is associated with the stage of first cancer, consistent with the concept that the initially presenting tumor has a lead-time advantage in establishing distant organ micrometastases.
The corollary is obvious: Less Informed Women With High Anxiety Are More Likely to Choose Bilateral Mastectomy for Breast Cancer San Francisco Cancer Symposium PracticeUpdate Editorial Team, 2014 Sept – Women with higher anxiety levels and less knowledge about breast cancer recurrence and survival are more likely to choose bilateral mastectomy , Katharine Yao, MD, of University of Chicago stated, “There is so much information about breast cancer that it’s easy for patients to get overwhelmed. As doctors, we have to be aware of each patient’s knowledge level and the concerns and worries he or she has. We need to do a better job of educating patients that the risk of developing contralateral breast cancer is actually low and that breast cancer can come back in other parts of the body no matter what type of surgery they have.” Overall, 59% of patients chose lumpectomy, 32% unilateral mastectomy, and 9% CPM. Eighty-three (58%) considered CPM, and 12 (21%) of this latter group chose CPM contralateral prophylactic mastectomy.
11 August 2014 The current SA Menopause Society newsletter says:
Benefits of mammography
|
“the benefits of screening mammography are modest at best” (Elmore & Harris BMJ 2014;348:g3824). This is the conclusion after the latest research to come out of Norway where the introduction of screening has been gradually introduced over the last 2 decades (Weedon-Fekjaer et al BMJ 2014;348:g3701).The Norwegian authorities invited women between 50 and 70 years old to attend for screening every second year and looked at before and after death rates from breast cancer. They found RELATIVE risk reduction of 28% in those invited compared with those not invited to be screened. Without knowing the ACTUAL risk reduction or the harms of screening this sounds like a “good deal”. However it is an observational study not a randomised trial and therefore susceptible to various biases.For women to make up their own minds about screening, actual figures of benefits and harms need to be given because without accuracy perceived dangers and benefits are very far from reality. For example in the US or UK asking women about their estimates of breast cancer deaths – taking 1000 women aged 50 and following them for 20 years – gave the following results:
Of 1000, number
alive after 20 years |
Deaths from
breast cancer |
Deaths from
other causes |
Women’s estimates
without screening |
801 |
160 |
39 |
| with screening |
881 |
80 |
39 |
In reality
without screening |
956 |
5 |
39 |
| with screening |
956-7 |
4 |
39-40 |
Women believe that breast cancer is a far greater threat than it really is. They also believe that screening halves such risk.
If actual death reductions from breast cancer are taken into account, screening benefits are modest at best and if all cause deaths are taken into account the benefits all but disappear. |
20 July 2014 Two new papers from Scandinavia highlight the harms of screening mammography.:
Clin Adv Hematol Oncol. 2014 June;12:407-11 Screening mammography: do the benefits always outweigh the harms? Brodersen J, Jørgensen KJ, Brawley OW.
APMIS. 2014 May 26. doi: 10.1111/apm.12278.
Overdiagnosis: How cancer screening can turn indolent pathology into illness. Brodersen J1, Schwartz LM, Woloshin S. The shift from illness to disease has had a profound impact on modern medicine – particularly in the realm of cancer screening. In screening, it is not patients with illness who seek help from the healthcare system; it is asymptomatic healthy individuals who are invited into the healthcare system to be examined for pathology. The underlying assumption of screening is that abnormalities and pathology always progress. If this were true, it would always make sense to look for disease even when people feel well. The million (or more accurately multi-billion) dollar question is whether the fundamental assumption that disease invariably leads to illness is valid. This is the question that the present paper will try to explore and answer.
The current Wiki article on Cancer Screening firmly denies benefit for screening for silent prostate cancer; and for xray screening mammography it firmly questions the benefit in lives saved versus the harms of screening. The balance for screening mammogram is summed up by Wiki : “The phenomenon of finding pre-invasive malignancy or nonmalignant benign disease is commonplace in all forms of cancer screening, including pap smears for cervical cancer, fecal occult blood testing for colon cancer, and prostate-specific antigen testing for prostate cancer. All of these tests have the potential to detect asymptomatic cancers, and all of them have a high rate of false positives and lead to invasive procedures that are unlikely to benefit the patient.”
Reality remains that, in average lean well adults ie without obvious risks , the only screening justified is regular noninvasive SELF- EXAMINATION of breast, skin, testes, electronic bloodpressure; and professional optometric, dental, skin and bloodpressure screening and, if suspicious, urine multistix exam. By contrast, regular xray (chest or mammogram- cumulative radiation risk) and pelvic internal exams are highly invasive, thus indicated only for symptomatic or familial-risk cases. .
PEER (perverse) PRESSURE, Beliefs, perceptions, indoctrination – by peer bodies, Corporates like Hospitals and Big Pharma, Regulators, Accredition Bodies and dangled incentives – which obviously have commercial group vested self-interests – die hard: Prev Med. 2014 Jul 16.Miller JW1, Goff BA ea . CDC & Washington State University, USA, studied Physicians’ Beliefs about Effectiveness of Cancer Screening Tests: National Survey of Family Physicians, General Internists, and Obstetrician-Gynecologists. (excluding breast radiologists, pathologists, and oncologist/surgeons). RESULTS: of 1574 respondents- 62% response rate- the majority agreed with the effectiveness of: mammography aged 50-69 years, Pap tests aged 21-65 years, and colonoscopy for aged ≥50 years. Physicians typically listed their respective specialty organizations as a top influence for screening recommendations. CONCLUSIONS: There were several substantial inconsistencies between physician beliefs in the effectiveness of cancer screening tests and the actual evidence of these tests’ effectiveness which can lead both to underuse and overuse of cancer screening tests.
This outcome obviously damns professional bodies in respect at least of the evidence discouraging screening mammography of well breasts.
Its as Soren Kierkegaard wrote 150 years ago about religious conviction- the difficulty of following ethical theistic belief against the majority tide of convenience and venality;
and Steven Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria of Science and Religion- for some (but not all), the difficulty of reconciling apparent scientific medical evidence (is it ever immutable? ) with belief, dogma- whether from mythical (is it always?) religious belief, or simply vested interest.
As we were taught 50 years ago, if new medical discoveries stand the test of time – they often dont- it takes a generation for the majority to accept, apply them. Almost two generations of women have now been martyred by repetitive screening xray mammography. Must it take yet another generation before such barbaric screening is abandoned? As Winwood Reade and AC Grayling philosophized, countless millions have suffered genocide, holocaust in the post-Greko-Roman “enlightened” two millennia for vested interests in the guise of religious let alone medical dogma .
14 July 2014: BASTILLE DAY CLARION CALL FOR TRUTH TO PROTECT WOMEN: “Screening mammography & Bambi This column reported these issues a few months ago (see Dr Gerd Gigerenzer PhD below in May, and April 16, 2014 from the Swiss Medical Board: Abolishing Mammography Screening Programs? ), but they are worth repeating from Groote Schuur Hospital. A professor of Obstets and Gyne there writes in the current South African Menopause Matters news email (“an editorial opinion that does not necessarily represent the views of SAMS”) :
(the answer to his question: Whatever happened to Evidence-Based medicine? is quite simple: if it doesnt pay, then evade, deny and mock the evidence, or better, shoot the messenger who dares blow the whistle on inconvenient truth. )
15 June 2014 this month: SMALL BENEFITS, SUBSTANTIAL HARMS WITH MAMMOGRAPHY SCREENING is a trenchant review by Prof Cornelia Baines breast clinician from Canada on why xray screening mammography does well breasts and women far more harm than good. Prof Stephen Duffy statistician at UCL argues the reverse.
already 30 years ago Seely and Horrobinin Diet and breast cancer: possible connection with sugar consumption hypothesized: younger and older women (possibly pre- and post-menopausal women) differ with respect to such correlations. In older women a strong correlation was found between breast cancer mortality and sugar consumption (correlation coefficient = 0.9).. In younger women the correlation with diet is weak. A possible connecting link between sugar consumption and breast cancer is insulin. This is an absolute requirement for the proliferation of normal mammary tissue and experimental mammary tumours may regress in its absence. Insulin secretion occurs in response to blood glucose level and could be excessive if the regulatory mechanism is overtaxed by large sugar intake. The same mechanism might account for the increased risk of mammary cancer in diabetics.
A major Nurses’ Health decades-long Study review from Harvard shows no relationship between fat intake and breast cancer.
By contrast, studies from Mexican 2004, Canada 2005, Italy 2006 , and New York 2009 confirm direct association between sugar intake and breast cancer. . Only a study from Denmark 2005 shows no relationship.
Hence the HighFat LowCarbs (William Banting 1863) diet is now established by the rigorous scientific references of the past 150 years assembled by science writer Gary Taubes in The Diet Delusion , and advised to all for prevention and management of obesity and all other common major diseases including breast and all cancers.
As investigative journalists write recently, like Taubes and rational scientists the past 50years, the major cause of all common chronic degenerative disease including cancer and immunoincompetence is not fat but refined carbs – the root cause of the SACCHARINE DISEASES that Cleave, Campbell, Burkitt reported occurring in pastoral tribes converting to the western commercialized diet of sugar, refined cereals and rice . They note that in the Mouse Cancer Study in cancer-prone mice, 2011, which claimed that high (fat)cholesterol intake promotes breast cancer, the control mice (not major carnivores but omnivores) were fed a balanced natural chow with 4.5% fat, 23% protein, and 50% carbohydrate, whereas the test mice were fed a totally synthetic chow meant to represent a western human cholesterolemic diet: 20% fat, 17% protein, and 48% carbohydrate. So in fact the high risk factor for cancer and all disease was not the higher fat intake (20% as dairy fat) vs 4.5%- from fish meal and soy/cereals) but the 48% carbs (2/3 sucrose, 15% (malto)dextrins -which absorb as rapidly as glucose) intake and 19% casein (a major health problem) in the test chow. They failed to include a control group on what is natural mouse diet ie free of refined carbs and milk : “RSPCA 2014: Wild mice – opportunistic omnivores- will eat a wide variety of seeds, grains, and other plant material as well as invertebrates, small vertebrates and carrion”. Thus plenty of natural seed/grain fats and mixed protein and plant carbs, zero sugar or refined carbs- ie the Banting diet. ..
A new 18year observational followup study from Swedenlast year in 62000 people assessed total energy intake – carbohydrate from median 61 to 39% , protein 11 to 19% , and fat 27 to 42% . LCHP scores were positively related to intake of animal protein, but negatively related to plant protein. For carbohydrate and fat, associations were consistent in sucrose and whole grain and saturated and unsaturated fat, respectively. Across the range of macronutrients, there was no clear significant trend for particular cancers. This is not surprising as the intake of carbs range d from 40 to 60% and fat from 27 to 42%. Thus no cohort was on a highfat low carbs ketogenic diet as Banting, Noakes et al find successful. . the lowest % carbs group at best had similar fat % intake ie there was no low-carbs cohort taking below 30% carbs..There is a vast difference in calorie intake between their “optimal’ LCHP 42:40 fat:carbs ie 1:1 , versus the true ketogenic HifatLowcarbs diet of eg 50:<30 fat:carbs ie >1.66:1.
Allowing up to 20% protein in total energy intake, fat may need to be close to 50% energy and carbs below 30%, thus ensuring ketogenesis to shed excess fat and avoid depositing more glycogen and adiposity ; so eg for a 2000kcal/day diet, thats up to 100gms protein 400kcal mostly from flesh and nuts; carbs below 150gms 600kcal (in nuts and rainbow vegs) , and fat up to 1000 kcal ie 110gms from cream (not milk), nuts, avo, eggs, butter, cheese and fatty flesh. .
VITAMIN C each 100mg/day increment reduces allcause mortality by 27%, and breast cancer mortality by 22%: a metaanalysis by the Karolinska- Harris ea last month found 10 trials of vitamin C use and intake in breast cancer, included 17,696 breast cancer cases, 2791 total deaths, and 1558 breast cancer-specific deaths. The summary RR (95% CI) for post-diagnosis vitamin C supplement use was 0.81 (95% CI 0.72-0.91) for total mortality and 0.85 (95% CI 0.74-0.99) for breast cancer-specific mortality. The summary RR for a 100mg per day increase in dietary vitamin C intake was 0.73 (95% CI 0.59-0.89) for total mortality and 0.78 (95% CI 0.64-0.94) for breast cancer-specific mortality- ie 25% lower mortality for every 100mg higher daily vit C intake..
VITAMIN D AND BREAST CANCER:
20 years ago Newmark from Sloan Kettering NY wrote : High dietary fat increases mammary epithelial cell proliferation, particularly the “hormonally driven” hyperproliferation during breast growth and development in young animals. Increased dietary calcium (and probably vitamin D) lessens the increase of proliferation induced by high fat. These data, although limited, suggest that the maximum effect of diet (high fat increase, as well as calcium and vitamin D modulation) on eventual breast cancer may be during puberty, and adolescence, when the mammary gland is actively growing and developing. (3) An inverse epidemiological correlation exists between sunlight availability as a source of vitamin D and the risk of breast cancer in the U.S. and Canada. (4) Current vitamin D and calcium dietary intake in the U.S. is far below the RDA in all female age groups, particularly for the elderly. (5) Reduction of breast cancer risk, and simultaneously osteoporosis, might be achieved by increasing dietary intake of calcium and vitamin D to RDA levels. This may be particularly applicable to females during puberty and adolescence.
20 May 2014 BREASTS TO KILL: KILLER BRAS
For the past 4 years, Sure Touch examiners have observed that many women who wear underwired bras have a string of pearl – fibrous lumps- where the bra wire cuts into them inferiorly; and sometimes radially under the ‘ spokes’ of the bra cups. We have not yet detected a cancer in such symmetrical lumpiness, which we find diminishes with change to a soft bra and healing massage with Lugols iodine, coconut oil and DMSO.
This bra risk was postulated in the book Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras(1995, 2005), (NaturalNews).
19 May 2014 update: Dr Gerd Gigerenzer PhD, professor at a number of top USA and German institutions and expert in uncertainty, heuristic problem-solving, writes: This One Graphic Will Change the Way You Look at Breast Cancer Screening:The most trenchant reasoning against screening xray mammography this year is in Time Magazine 1 May 2014; which he argues definitely applies to screening mammography: he details four tricks used by zealous proponents of screening mammography to infamously persuade gullible women why ““If you haven’t had a mammogram, you need more than your breasts examined.” These tricks are as follows, but are debunked by the absolute facts in his Fact Box below. He says:
“First, look at the benefit. Out of every thousand women aged 50 and older, five without screening died from breast cancer, compared to four in the screening group. This is an absolute reduction of 1 in 1,000. In fact, it might even be an optimistic estimate because the Canadian follow-up study of women for 25 years after these trials found no reduction at all. But the exact number is not my point here. What I want to explain is how women are being misled.
Trick #1: State that screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 20% or more, because it sounds more impressive than explaining that the absolute risk reduction is 1 in 1,000. This trick has been used for years in pamphlets. You might think, well, it’s not much, but at least one life is saved. But even that is not true. The number of deaths from all cancers, breast cancer included, is the same in both groups, as seen in line two of the fact box. And that leads us to trick #2: Don’t mention that mammography screening doesn’t reduce the chance of dying from cancer. Talk only about the reduction in dying from breast cancer. Often, and particularly if a person had multiple cancers, the exact cause of death is unclear. For this reason, total cancer mortality is the more reliable information when you look at it in terms of the larger goal: saving lives. In plain words, there is no evidence to date that routine mammography screening saves lives. Now let’s look at the harms.
Trick #3: Don’t tell women about unnecessary surgery, biopsies and other harms from overtreatment. If you are asked, play these down. The first way a mammogram can harm women is if it comes back with a false positive, leading to invasive and unnecessary biopsies. This isn’t the rare fluke most people seem to think it is. This happens to about a hundred out of every thousand women who participated in screening. Legions of women have suffered from this procedure and the related anxieties. After false alarms, many worried for months, developing sleeping problems and affecting relationships with family and friends.
Second, not all breast cancers are life-threatening. Women who have a nonprogressive or slowly growing form that they would never have noticed during their lifetime often undergo lumpectomy, mastectomy, toxic chemotherapy or other interventions that have no benefit for them and that are often accompanied with damaging side-effects. This happened to about five women out of a thousand who participated in screening.
The final trick #4 Tell women about increased survival. For instance, “If you participate in screening and breast cancer is detected, your survival rate is 98%.” Don’t mention mortality.
1 May 2014 update: Dr Iona Heath FRCP, past president of the New Zealand Royal College of GPs , says in March that Breast cancer mammography screening causes more harm than good. Dr Kurt Kroenke from Univ Indiana two weeks ago wrote That most screening test results will be normal or negative is commonplace, but the reality that abnormal results are frequently false-positive is not always well appreciated, nor is it fully conveyed to patients. How does a patient feel after a false-positive test result? Tosteson and colleagues1 concluded from their longitudinal study that “false-positive mammograms are associated with a measurable, small, and transient effect on personal anxiety.” However, a closer look at all the outcomes assessed in this well-done study reveal some adverse consequences that, although not serious, may nonetheless be meaningful.
Given the harms of screening, the Spanish consortium sum it up nicely last February: Optimal (mammography) screening is characterized by quinquennial or triennial periodicities for the low or moderate risk-groups and annual periodicity for the high-risk group. This last group is in reality tiny.
As this ongoing Woman’s Care column stresses, very few well women at any age justify screening mammography, or any screening beyond thorough annual review and bloodpressure and breast exam check. Only if the annual checkup, with the examining clinician’s concern about clinical breast feel, or the woman’s breast symptoms (which in fact rarely originate in the breast and are mostly easily resolved) raise suspicions, may some sort of no-xray breast imaging be justified- soft SureTouch or ultrasound, or no-touch thermography . No woman without an obvious growing solitary breast lump or nipple bleeding/ discharge warrants the harms of initial xray screening mammogram.
Unlike Bone Density Screening available on request, Sure Touch Breast screening is not charged for since it is part of a proper professional clinical consultation- which can be booked for any regular workday. It is the expert clinical consultation, and any necessary advised evidence-based natural breast supplements and other changes for prevention, that are billed- obviously at viable market rates, but reduced on justified request based on usual means test.
Breast imaging on its own, without expert clinical assessment and advice , is hazardous because it may cause unwarranted concern and lead to the fearsome and costly invasive cascade; and because breast imaging without thorough risk factor assessment including expert clinical exam may miss disease that justifies further steps if not immediate resolution.
HOW TO AVOID UNSETTLING, HARMING WOMEN? As applies to unjustified mass prostate screening of well men, two new relevant publications below this month highlight the widening gap around MASS BREAST MAMMOGRAPHY SCREENING, between realist holists- independent Swiss reviewers looking at the welfare of women and the real cost-benefits of breast screening till now – versus the burn & cut-at-any-cost screening-industry Dutch career radiologists’ and cancer experts’vested-interest view looking solely at breast cancer deaths 2004-5, like most for-profit breast -career specialists targeting every last well breast from 40years upwards.
The latest Cochrane metanalysis 2013 “found that breast cancer mortality was an unreliable outcome that was biased in favour of screening, mainly because of differential misclassification of cause of death.”
Boston, San Francisco- Illinois and Spanish- Catalonia– universities’ reviewers recently make a less in-your-face case against universal mass mammography screening, rather selective screening frequency based on individualized risk factors and potential harms.. But they dont refer to equally effective non-xray imaging techniques; or the fact that no imaging techniques except tissue histology can confirm or exclude cancer. .
First, we noticed that the ongoing debate was based on a series of reanalyses of the same, predominantly outdated trials. The first trial started 50 years ago in New York City and the last in 1991 in the United Kingdom.1 None of these trials were initiated in the era of modern breast-cancer treatment, which has dramatically improved the prognosis of women with breast cancer. Could the modest benefit of mammography screening in terms of breast-cancer mortality that was shown in trials initiated between 1963 and 1991 still be detected in a trial conducted today?
Second, we were struck by how nonobvious it was that the benefits of mammography screening outweighed the harms. The relative risk reduction of approximately 20% in breast-cancer mortality associated with mammography that is currently described by most expert panels2 came at the price of a considerable diagnostic cascade, with repeat mammography, subsequent biopsies, and overdiagnosis of breast cancers — cancers that would never have become clinically apparent. The recently published extended follow-up of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study is likely to provide reliable estimates of the extent of overdiagnosis. After 25 years of follow-up, it found that 106 of 484 screen-detected cancers (21.9%) were overdiagnosed.3 This means that 106 of the 44,925 healthy women in the screening group were diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer unnecessarily, which resulted in needless surgical interventions, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or some combination of these therapies.
In addition, a Cochrane review of 10 trials involving more than 600,000 women showed no evidence of mammography screening benefit on overall mortality.1 In the best case, the small reduction in breast-cancer deaths was attenuated by deaths from other causes. In the worst case, the reduction was canceled out by deaths caused by coexisting conditions or by the harms of screening and associated overtreatment. Did the available evidence, taken together, indicate that mammography screening indeed benefits women?
Third, we were disconcerted by the discrepancy between women’s perceptions of the benefits of mammography screening and the benefits to be expected in reality. The figure Women’s Perceptions of the Effects of Mammography Screening on Breast-Cancer Mortality as Compared with the Actual Effects. shows the numbers of 50-year-old women in the United States expected to be alive, to die from breast cancer, or to die from other causes if they are invited to undergo regular mammography every 2 years over a 10-year period, as compared with women who do not undergo mammography. The numbers in Panel A are derived from a survey about U.S. women’s perceptions,4 in which 717 of 1003 women (71.5%) said they believed that mammography reduced the risk of breast-cancer deaths by at least half, and 723 women (72.1%) thought that at least 80 deaths would be prevented per 1000 women who were invited for screening. The numbers in Panel B reflect the most likely scenarios according to available trials1-3: a relative risk reduction of 20% and prevention of 1 breast-cancer death. The data for Switzerland, reported in the same study, show similarly overly optimistic expectations. How can women make an informed decision if they overestimate the benefit of mammography so grossly?
The Swiss Medical Board’s report was made public on February 2, 2014 . It acknowledged that systematic mammography screening might prevent about one death attributed to breast cancer for every 1000 women screened, even though there was no evidence to suggest that overall mortality was affected. At the same time, it emphasized the harm — in particular, false positive test results and the risk of overdiagnosis. For every breast-cancer death prevented in U.S. women over a 10-year course of annual screening beginning at 50 years of age, 490 to 670 women are likely to have a false positive mammogram with repeat examination; 70 to 100, an unnecessary biopsy; and 3 to 14, an overdiagnosed breast cancer that would never have become clinically apparent.5 The board therefore recommended that no new systematic mammography screening programs be introduced and that a time limit be placed on existing programs. In addition, it stipulated that the quality of all forms of mammography screening should be evaluated and that clear and balanced information should be provided to women regarding the benefits and harms of screening.
The report caused uproar and was emphatically rejected by a number of Swiss cancer experts and organizations, some of which called the conclusions “unethical.” One of the main arguments used against it was that it contradicted the global consensus of leading experts in the field — a criticism that made us appreciate our unprejudiced perspective resulting from our lack of exposure to past consensus-building efforts by specialists in breast-cancer screening. Another argument was that the report unsettled women, but we wonder how to avoid unsettling women, given the available evidence.
The Swiss Medical Board is nongovernmental, and its recommendations are not legally binding. Therefore, it is unclear whether the report will have any effect on the policies in our country. Although Switzerland is a small country, there are notable differences among regions, with the French- and Italian-speaking cantons being much more in favor of screening programs than the German-speaking cantons — a finding suggesting that cultural factors need to be taken into account. Eleven of the 26 Swiss cantons have systematic mammography screening programs for women 50 years of age or older; two of these programs were introduced only last year. One German-speaking canton, Uri, is reconsidering its decision to start a mammography screening program in light of the board’s recommendations. Participation in existing programs ranges from 30 to 60% — variation that can be partially explained by the coexistence of opportunistic screening offered by physicians in private practice. At least three quarters of all Swiss women 50 years of age or older have had a mammogram at least once in their life. Health insurers are required to cover mammography as part of systematic screening programs or within the framework of diagnostic workups of potential breast disease.
update 23 March 2014: Caroline Huang at the Ethox Centre at Oxford writes in Screening mammography: benefits, harms, and evidence-based guidelines in the US and UK: The Ethox Centre is a multidisciplinary bioethics research centre in the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health.“Authors Bleyer and Welch claim there has been only an 8% reduction in late-stage breast cancer diagnoses (an absolute reduction of 8 cases per 100,000 women), and while mortality has decreased, it appears that most of the benefit has come from better treatment rather than better screening. (For cancer screening to be considered effective, the US National Cancer Institute says that cancer deaths and late-stage cancer diagnoses should decrease, while early-stage cancer diagnoses should increase.[2])
Contrast these findings to another mammography study published the same week in The Lancet, conducted by an independent panel in the UK as a meta-analysis of 11 randomized trials.[3] The panel estimated overdiagnosis of early-stage breast cancers in the UK to be between 11 and 19%. Crucially, though, there appeared to be a 20% mortality benefit from screening alone.What might account for these significantly different estimations of breast cancer screening effectiveness? The most obvious factor is the frequency and age at which average-risk women are offered mammography. In the UK, women ages 50-70 are offered screening every three years through the NHS Breast Cancer Screening Programme. In the US, women ages 40-70 are typically offered screening every one or two years.
Though a 2009 US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) report recommended that average-risk women should receive screening from ages 50-74 every two years,[4] this recommendation has been not been adopted by professional organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiologists, and the National Cancer Institute. In fact, a study published in November in Preventive Medicine showed that there has been no difference in mammograms provided across any age groups in the US since the 2009 USPSTF report was published.[5]These two studies (and many others preceding them) raise plenty of practical questions about diagnostic thresholds, benefits of population screening, limitations of current radiology technologies, and understanding of which cancers do and do not become invasive. But I want to raise a broader question: should there be an ethical imperative compelling different US professional groups that address the same disease or disorder to adopt a common set of evidence-based guidelines?
And if there isn’t, then what is the value of having a group like the USPSTF to issue recommendations that may ultimately be ignored by its target audiences?A few reasons for adopting a common set of evidence-based guidelines might be reducing patient and provider confusion, enhancing low-cost access to care, and potentially redistributing funds to further the reach of proven services or improve research. While the National Breast Cancer Screening Programme requires only the NHS to adopt and implement new recommendations, the more fragmented US system means that screening is not organized by a single body and thus involves competing recommendations that could confuse patients trying to make informed choices and providers trying to assist them in doing so. Additionally, because US insurers are increasingly moving towards funding only evidence-based services, having a common set of guidelines would help ensure that providers’ recommended services are covered under patients’ insurance rather than falling into a category of services with questionable benefit that might not be covered. This is perhaps not the optimal ethical consideration to have to make, but it is a necessary component of realistic preventive care. Finally, at the health system level, providing mammograms only to women ages 50-74 might mean that resources currently allocated to mammograms for women ages 40-49 could be put towards more mammograms for women ages 50-74 or other related preventive health services or research.Despite these reasons, however, it would be equally problematic to remove clinical groups’ ability to disagree with recommendations that they believe result from poor statistics or faulty logic. It also does not seem like there is intrinsic opposition to adopting recommendations produced by independent panels or other clinical groups.
The same Preventive Medicine study discussed above references two cases in which recommendations resulted in immediate changes to screening patterns: (1) the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society’s 1997 recommendation that mammography be expanded to women ages 40-49 resulted in increased screening, and (2) the USPSTF’s 2008 recommendation against prostate cancer screening in men ages 75 and older resulted in fewer early-stage prostate cancer diagnoses. So the USPSTF has not always been unsuccessful in having its recommendations taken seriously, even in a case where less screening is recommended, and at least one breast cancer screening recommendation has previously had a quick adoption in practice.These cases – as well as the USPSTF 2002 recommendation that originally suggested offering mammography to women ages 40-49 once every 1-2 years, which is reflected in current clinician groups’ guidelines – suggest that the USPSTF’s target audiences aren’t willfully ignoring meta-analyses of available data. Rather, clinicians, advocacy groups, and patients have questioned the methodology behind the 2009 USPSTF recommendation, in a similar fashion to the critiques being raised over the NEJM study.
For example, the American College of Radiology suggested that Bleyer and Welch failed to properly account for an increasing incidence of invasive late-stage breast cancers unrelated to screening uptake.[6] In light of this information, we might reframe the second question to ‘How do we ensure that groups like the USPSTF incorporate the right kind of data into their analyses and recommendations?’ That answer might have to do with rethinking how consultation with relevant clinical and patient advocacy groups is carried out, as well as examining a broader range of data sources. To circle back to the contrast between the NEJM and Lancet findings, it is important to think about how and why the UK’s National Breast Cancer Screening Programme seems to have lower rates of overdiagnosis and greater mortality benefit from screening relative to the US screening system. At the very least, these kinds of contradictory non-US outcomes should prompt a re-evaluation of which kinds of evidence we have chosen to evaluate.We might also point to the discourse around prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing – which has been linked to overdiagnosis of early-stage, non-invasive prostate cancer – as one model for where breast cancer screening recommendations may go. Importantly, while clinical organizations have not reached consensus in whether PSA testing should be recommended as a yearly exam for men over 50,[7] they do agree that a careful discussion of PSA testing’s potential harms and benefits is always appropriate.Indeed, the authors of both the Lancet and NEJM articles conclude with similar thoughts: physicians must initiate conversations about the pros and cons of mammography so that patients can make informed choices. That assertion seems uncontroversial enough to be accepted by the various professional groups involved – so perhaps any common set of guidelines we should expect groups to adopt should relate to the communication of evidence rather than potentially controversial or insufficient evidence itself.”
15/3/ 2014 update: Great Mammography Debate : Dr. Patrick Borgen, Chairman of Surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, talks about the role of screening mammography, a topic bracketed by strong opinions. It has been a particular focus of discussion at the 31st Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference, held March 6 through March 9, 2014, in Miami, Florida.
Commentary The mammography debate is one of the facets of the Miami Breast Cancer Conference this year. It seems as though the field of breast cancer has always been controversial, going back half a century, and breast cancer is a disease that, more than most others, is very polarizing. This disease engenders great passion—and great debate, which has been ongoing about the role of screening mammography.
A few weeks ago, The New York Times covered an article that was published in the British Medical Journal 1 about the Canadian National Breast Screening Study. On the surface, this study failed to show any benefit from mammography. That was the story that the writer, Gina Kolata, picked up and ran with. Ms. Kolata had written about her own experience with breast cancer a number of years ago; her breast cancer had not been picked up on a mammogram, and so she is somewhat biased.
In short, the Canadian study evaluated mammograms from more than 90,000 women who had very primitive mammograms between 1980 and 1984, and that is really the first problem with this study: the technology and the equipment then was incredibly limited, such that the mammograms only showed 30% of breast cancers; whereas, today, mammography detects 70% to 80% of breast cancers. Thus, taking results generated by technology from 34 years ago and making a conclusion about them in today’s world is a stretch.
One of the fundamental flaws of the Canadian study, besides the dated technology on which the conclusions were based, was that it was not randomized. Nurses, and, in some provinces in Canada, doctors, did a clinical breast exam, and, if they felt a mass or a lump, they preferentially put the patient into the mammography arm. That is what I would have done in their place; if I felt a lump, I would not be willing to send someone home.
By the end of the study, there were more than 100 extra breast cancers in the mammography arm and more breast cancers that had spread to lymph nodes in the mammography arm. And, in fact, the chance of dying of breast cancer was higher in the mammography arm.
All of the authorities with whom I have ever spoken or read who have reviewed this study dismiss it as very flawed. A number of the doctors who were involved with the study resigned their positions in protest. Despite all of that, The New York Times ran an article headlined, “Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms” (February 11, 2014).
Well, it is a vastly flawed study, and, in fact, there are six other, much larger and much better controlled studies, all of which showed a reduction in breast cancer mortality from 20% up to 40% in women who have mammograms—and that is certainly what we observe clinically.
We felt that it was important to really highlight this at the Miami Breast Cancer Conference this year. My guess is that our audience already knows this; but, what we would like to give them is the science about why the Canadian study was flawed so that they can talk to their patients and talk to their colleagues who may not be in the breast cancer field. That is really what I think our mission is for part of this year’s conference.
We think that this is dangerous information. We think that women will unnecessarily lose their lives to breast cancer if they forego mammography, which this study frankly says one should. I have a busy practice in Brooklyn, New York, and, at least once or twice a week, I see someone, without any question, whose life was saved by a mammogram.
I think that we all agree we need something better than mammography. We all agree that mammography can lead to over-diagnosis of breast cancers, and over-diagnosis happens, of course, when we screen for diseases in other areas of the body. We all accept this limitation.
But, for a major media outlet to take a single study that was deeply flawed and not even mention the existence of other studies, even as a point–counterpoint, I think was a bit outrageous!
12 March 2014 this publication on the Huffington Post website today under screening mammography is as appropriate as when it was published in 2010:
BREAST CANCER UNAWARENESS MONTH: Rethinking Mammograms
Samuel S. Epstein Cancer prevention expert, Prof. Emeritus at U. of IL School of Public Health, Chicago. In 1984, the American Cancer Society (ACS), the world’s largest nonprofit organization, inaugurated the October National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM), with its flagship National Mammography Day. The NBCAM was conceived and funded by the Imperial Chemical Industries, a leading international manufacturer of petrochemicals, and its U.S. subsidiary Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. Zeneca is the sole manufacturer of Tamoxifen, which has been widely used for treating breast cancer.
The NBCAM has assured women that “early (mammography) detection results in a cure nearly 100 percent of the time.” More specifically, the NBCAM is directed to claims for reducing the incidence and mortality of breast cancer through early detection by annual mammography starting at age 40. Moreover, mammograms can miss cancers in premenopausal women due to the density of their breasts, and also fail to detect cancers smaller than half an inch.
Still denied by the ACS is clear evidence that premenopausal mammography poses significant risks of breast cancer. The routine practice of taking two films annually for each breast results in approximately 0.5 rad (radiation absorbed dose) exposure. This is about 500 times the dose from a single chest X-ray and is broadly focused on the entire chest rather than narrowly on the breast. This is also 25 times higher than is allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency for whole-body radiation from local nuclear industries (0.02 rad). Moreover, the breast is the most sensitive organ to ionizing radiation.
As warned by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1972 but still ignored by the ACS, the premenopausal breast is highly sensitive to the risks of cancer from mammography, as each rad exposure increases the risks of breast cancer by 1 percent. This results in a cumulative 10 percent increased risk for each breast following a decade of routine screening. This can also accounts for the 19-percent increased incidence of breast cancer since 1975. Not surprisingly, the prestigious U.S. Preventive Task Force, supported by the National Breast Cancer Coalition, warned last year against routine premenopausal mammography. Also, not surprisingly, routine premenopausal mammography is practiced by no nation other than the U.S.
Risks of premenopausal mammography are some four-fold greater for the 2 percent of women who are carriers of the A-T gene (ataxia telangiectasia) and are highly sensitive to the carcinogenic effects of radiation. By some estimates, this accounts for up to 20 percent of all breast cancers diagnosed annually. Compounding these problems, missed cancers are common in premenopausal women due to the density of their breasts.
That most breast cancers are first recognized by women was admitted by the ACS in 1985. “We must keep in mind that at least 90 percent of the women who develop breast cancer discover the tumors themselves.” Furthermore, an analysis of several 1993 studies showed that women who regularly performed breast self-examination (BSE) detected their cancers much earlier than women failing to examine themselves. The effectiveness of BSE, however, depends on training by skilled professionals, enhanced by an annual clinical breast examination. Nevertheless, in spite of such evidence, the ACS dismisses BSE, and claims that “no studies have clearly shown [its] benefit.”
As reported in our 1999 publication in the International Journal of Health Services, an article in a leading Massachusetts newspaper featured a photograph of two women in their twenties. The article promised that early detection by mammography results in a cure “nearly 100 percent of the time.” Questioned by journalist Kate Dempsey, an ACS communications director responded: “The ad isn’t based on a study. When you make an advertisement, you just say what you can to get women in the door. You exaggerate a point — Mammography today is a lucrative [and] highly competitive business.”
If all 20 million U.S. premenopausal women submitted to annual mammograms, the minimal annual costs would be $2.5 billion. Such costs would be increased some fourfold if the industry, supported by radiologists, succeeds in its efforts to replace film machines, costing about $100,000, with high-tech digital machines, costing over $400,000, even in the absence of any evidence for their improved effectiveness.
With this background, it is hardly surprising that the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month neglects to inform women how they can reduce their risks of breast cancer. In fact, we know a great deal about its avoidable causes which remain ignored by the ACS. These include:
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- Prolonged use of the Pill, and estrogen replacement therapy.
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- Prolonged consumption of milk from cows injected with a genetically engineered growth hormone to increase milk production. This milk is contaminated with high levels of a natural growth factor, which increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold.
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- High consumption of meat, as it is contaminated with potent natural or synthetic estrogens. These are routinely implanted in cattle before entry into feedlots, about 100 days prior to slaughter, to increase muscle mass and profits for the meat industry.
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- Prolonged exposure to a wide range of hormonal ingredients in conventional cosmetics and personal care products.
- Living near hazardous waste sites, petrochemical plants, power lines, and nuclear plants.
The enthusiastic and continuing support of premenopausal mammography by the ACS is hardly surprising in view of its major conflicts of interest that still remain unrecognized. Five radiologists have served as ACS presidents. In its every move, the ACS promotes the interests of the major manufacturers of mammogram machines and films, including Siemens, DuPont, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and Piker. The mammography industry also conducts research for the ACS, serves on its advisory boards, and donates considerable funds. DuPont is also a substantial backer of the ACS Breast Health Awareness Program. It sponsors television shows touting mammography; produces advertising, promotional materials and literature for hospitals and doctor; and lobbies Congress for legislation promoting the availability of mammography. The ACS has been and remains strongly linked with the mammography industry, while ignoring or criticizing the value of breast self-examination, even following training by a qualified nurse or clinician.
The ACS conflicts of interest extend well beyond the mammography industry. The ACS has received contributions in excess of $100,000 from a wide range of “Excalibur (industry) Donors,” who manufacture carcinogenic products. These include petrochemical companies (DuPont, BP and Pennzoil), Big Pharma (AstraZenceca, Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Company and Novartis), and cosmetic companies (Christian Dior, Avon, Revlon and Elizabeth Arden).
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; and a former President of the Rachel Carson Trust. His awards include the 1998 Right Livelihood Award and the 2005 Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medal for International Contributions to Cancer Prevention. Dr. Epstein has authored 270 scientific articles and 20 books on cancer prevention, including the groundbreaking “The Politics of Cancer” (1979), and most recently “Toxic Beauty” (2009, Benbella Books: http://www.benbellabooks.com) about carcinogens, besides other toxic ingredients, in cosmetics and personal care products. Email: epstein@uic.edu. Web: http://www.preventcancer.com.
update 6 March 2014 Switzerland debates dismantling its breast cancer screening programme BMJ 2014;348:g1625 “A row has erupted in Switzerland after the Swiss Medical Board recommended that the country’s mammography screening programme for breast cancer be suspended because it leads to too many unnecessary interventions.
In a report made public on 2 February, the board said that while systematic mammography screening for breast cancer saved 1-2 women’s lives for every 1000 screened, it led to unnecessary investigations and treatment for around 100 women in every 1000.1 “The desirable effect is offset by the undesirable effects,” said the report, which was based on study data from 1963 to 1991 comparing 1000 women who were screened with 1000 women who were not. The report also concluded that screening was not cost effective.…”
update 1 Mar 2014 Supporting informed decision making when clinical evidence and conventional wisdom, clash. The nub of the screening mammography war – and all hard-sell marketing hype- is elegantly analyzed by a USA multiUniversity Communications team in Against conventional wisdom: when the public, the media, and medical practice collide. Jakob Jensen ea argue that “the screening mammography controversy was driven by the systematic removal of uncertainty from science communication. To increase comprehension and adherence, health information communicators remove caveats, limitations, and hedging so science appears simple and more certain. This streamlining process is, in many instances, initiated by researchers as they engage in dissemination of their findings, and is facilitated by public relations professionals, journalists, public health practitioners, and others whose tasks involve using the results from research for specific purposes. Uncertainty is removed from public communication because many communicators believe that it is difficult for people to process and/or that it is something the audience wants to avoid. Uncertainty management theory posits that people can find meaning and value in uncertainty. CONCLUSIONS: Science is routinely simplified as it is prepared for public consumption. In line with the model of information overload, this practice may increase short-term adherence to recommendations at the expense of long-term message consistency and trust in science”.
The Mammography Saves Lives screening campaign was and is to recruit all older women to regular screening; it was progressively oversold by removing, ignoring the science uncertainty. “Science is routinely simplified as it is prepared for public consumption. In line with the model of information overload, this practice may increase short-term adherence to recommendations at the expense of long-term message consistency and trust in science”.
We see the same collusion between corporate marketeers and government regulators in so many high-profit industries:
* on Pubmed, screening mammography features for 50 years, and continued to expand exponentially without hindrance until enough epidemiologists – led by the Cochrane Group- collectively rang enough alarm bells the past decade. The zealous huge-profit USA radiology-oncology industry simply shouted down the negative result of the massive Canadian Screening Mammography trial outcome 30 years ago in 90 000 women, and continue to do so with the 25year results now reported. The huge Breast Industry retaliates by threatening whistle blowers.
*at the same time around 50years ago, as many of us were starting medical studies, Keys and Stamler et al in USA did bad epidemiological studies that subverted the facts of healthy indigenous diets around Europe, Africa and Asia, and the healthy traditional English-speaking (USA and the British Empire) working population’s mainly fresh meat/fish fat and farm produce diet,
to claim that the reverse be promoted- factory-produced low fat low cholesterol high carbohydrate (cereals, potato, white flour and white rice) – and worse, quadrupling of fructose and sucrose intake, with increasing obesity; and then noxious statins- for-all for the resultant carbs-inducedlipidemia “epidemic”; and the dangerous hypoglycemic drugs for mushrooming type 2 diabetes, and NSAIDs for arthritis; and numerous wannabe antiobesity drugs; and finally the new industry of bariatric surgery!.
see the classic expose books: John Gofman’s Preventing Breast Cancer 1996; James le Fanu ‘s The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine 1999 ; Gary Taubes’ The Diet Delusion (2007); Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma 2012 and Peter Gotzsche’s Mammography Screening: Truth, Lies and Controversy 2013
*and as a result, the past 30years,- against all rational food science and biology – Montsanto’s Government- approved rape of healthy food agriculture by genetically modified crops laced with toxic environmentally persistent glyphosate C3H8NO5P- Roundup.
It is no irony that one of the leading medical scientists of the 20th century Dr John Gofman took part in the Manhattan nuclear Project, was a pioneer of VLDL lipidology, and then an activist for protecting women against the accumulating harm of mammography – “there is no safe dose of radiation”.
| at Exam. |
Resulting Risk of Mammogram-Induced Breast Cancer. 1998 |
| Any age in |
1 exam: |
1 chance in about 1,100. |
| 30-34 range. |
5 exams: |
5 chances/1100, or 1 chance in 220. |
| Any age in |
1 exam: |
1 chance in about 1,900. |
| 35-49 range. |
10 exams: |
10 chances/1900, or 1 chance in 190. |
| Any age in |
1 exam: |
1 chance in about 2,000. |
| 50-64 range. |
15 exams: |
15 chances/2,000, or 1 chance in 133. |
Dr Emily Transue MD eloquently describes her personal disillusionment with screening mammography.
update 23 Feb 2014 Like Wikipedia on breast screening, Karen Kaplan in the L.A.Times this week challenges mammography radiologists: stop lying to patients about the benefits of screening mammography. As Dr David Katz in the Huffington Post muses, can we unmuddle mammography? The USA National Cancer Association promotion conspicuously avoids mentioning the equal balance between benefits and risks of screening mammography,
and Dr Charles Wright in the Toronto Globe and Mail says “It’s time for a new approach to mammograms“ .
The New York Times review this week turns the report of the Canadian trial to focus on the importance of breast self-examination; their other review agrees that Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms.
It is damning that Cochrane studies (which date from about 1994) -for mammography published only since year 2000 – have consistently found that screening mammography imaging has no material longterm survival benefit for women with apparently normal breasts, with numerous potential harms.
The question remains, should people without suspicious cancer symptoms or bad family history have any invasive screening (of breast and prostate) beyond regular appropriate physical examination? when all of us should follow sensible lifestyle, diet and appropriate supplements to minimize both acute and chronic diseases, and thus die well in old age.
If women without apparent high risk will not be satisfied by clinical reassurance, prescreening image recording without compression irradiation will depend on what is locally available.
The USA National Cancer Institute at the NIH , while dutifully promoting regular screening mammography, negates their promotion by listing precisely 7 lines, one benefit : Early detection of breast cancer with screening mammography means that treatment can be started earlier in the course of the disease, possibly before it has spread. Results from randomized clinical trials and other studies show that screening mammography may reduce the number of deaths from breast cancer among women ages 40 to 70, especially for those over age 50..
But it lists 46 lines of potential harms:”What are some of the potential harms of screening mammograms?
1. “Finding cancer early doesnt reduce a woman’s chance of dying from breast cancer or any cause. Even though mammograms can detect malignant tumors that cannot be felt, treating a small tumor does not always mean that the woman will not die from the cancer. A fast-growing or aggressive cancer may have already spread to other parts of the body before it is detected.
2. Fear: “Women with such detected early tumors live a longer period of time fearing that they likely have a fatal disease… screening mammograms dont help prolong the life of a woman who is suffering from other, more life-threatening health conditions. Depression anxiety let alone suicide are increased .
3. “False-negative results occur when mammograms appear normal even though breast cancer is present. Overall, screening mammos miss about 20% of breast cancers that are present at the time of screening.. from high breast density i.e., glandular tissue and connective tissue, together known as fibroglandular tissue) and fatty tissue. Because fibroglandular tissue and tumors have similar density, tumors can be harder to detect in women with denser breasts more often among younger women than among older women because younger women are more likely to have dense breasts. As a woman ages, her breasts usually become more fatty, and false-negative results become less likely. False-negative results can lead to delays in treatment and a false sense of security for affected women.
4. “False-positive results occur when radiologists decide mammograms are abnormal but no cancer is actually present. All abnormal mammograms should be followed up with additional testing (diagnostic mammograms, ultrasound, and/or biopsy) to determine whether cancer is present… more common for younger women, women who have had previous breast biopsies, women with a family history of breast cancer, and women who are taking estrogen (for example, menopausal hormone therapy). False-positive mammogram results can lead to anxiety and other forms of psychological distress in affected women. The additional testing required to rule out cancer can also be costly and time consuming and can cause physical discomfort. .
5. “Overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Screening mammograms can find cancers and cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS, noninvasive tumor cells that may become cancerous build up in the lining of breast ducts) that need to be treated. However, they can also find cancers and cases of DCIS that will never cause symptoms or threaten a woman’s life, leading to “overdiagnosis” of breast cancer. Treatment of these latter cancers and cases of DCIS is not needed leads to “overtreatment.” Overtreatment exposes women unnecessarily to the adverse effects associated with cancer therapy. Because doctors often cannot distinguish cancers and cases of DCIS that need to be treated from those that do not, they overtreat .
6. “Radiation exposure. Mammograms require very small doses of radiation. The risk of harm from this radiation exposure is extremely low, but repeated x-rays have the potential to cause cancer.
They fail to list other adverse effects: 7. Pain and bruising of crush mammography- sometimes prolonged; 8. spreading early and likely dormant cancer. 9. Increased incidence of breast cancer and thus more irradiation, mastectomy and all-cause mortality, and 10. complications of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. ………………………..
the Rapid Responses to the 25year Breast cancer incidence and mortality of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study show again the Great Divide between objective epidemiological evidence, and vested-interest belief by those whose careers and incomes depend on zealous pursuit of early (pre)cancers.
Prof Michael Baum as a former UK Screening Mammography leader again trenchantly quotes reality to protect women from terrorism by screening mammography and mastectomy, in particular urging the same policy of watchful waiting to see the natural course of early cancer- that has saved so many men from harmful diagnostic and therapeutic invasion of asymptomatic prostate cancer.
We must stress that, if the patient refuses or is denied conventional oncotherapy, Watchful Waiting should always be supported including by all possible improvements in multibeneficial diet, lifestyle and supplements, and avoidance of cancer-promoting estrogenics .
…………………………………….
Women who choose not to have mammography and oncotherapy for highly suspicious lumps or even advancing cancers, or have been classified by cancer clinics as too advanced for oncotherapy- told they have very short life expectancy- illustrate the lesson of watchful waiting with active intervention. We see surprising regression in breast lumps, breast cancer and quality life extension in those who refuse to accept the oncologists’ death predictions and who apply strong faith and some of the many evidence-based changes and preventative natural supplement remedies we have collated, before or even after the gamut / gauntlet of crush mammography, biopsy, surgery and radio-chemotherapy.
update 21 Feb 2014 The Oncologist publishes epidemiologist Archie Bleyer’s “Were Our Estimates of Overdiagnosis With Mammography Screening in the United States Based on Faulty Science”? rebuttal of radiologist Prof Daniel Kopans’ denial of the overdiagnosis of breast cancer.
The point Bleyer again makes is that women have the choice provided they are fully informed of the pros and cons, and the options to screening mammography and biopsy.
16 Feb 2014 update: a slew of new papers reinforces the futility and hazards of mammography screening for early breast cancer- and the divide between the vested interests of mammographers/ oncologists – those who make their living from finding every possible cancer- and the welfare of women:
Natural News today reviews criticisms of mammography from USA.
in NEJM 13 Feb , 2014, Lisa Rosenbaum MD , Univ Pensylvania: sums up the dilemma of real but unprofitable evidence vs profiteering, culture and feeling : “Misfearing” — Culture, Identity, and Our Perceptions of Health Risks Despite knowing that heart disease kills more women each year than all cancers combined, most women fear breast cancer far more — and their health-related behavior reflects this difference. If our sense of risk is less about fact than about feeling, how do we adjust it?
BMJ Feb 11, 2014: 25year Breast cancer incidence and mortality of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: randomised screening trial Anthony Miller, Cornelia Baines, Steven Nar ea, compared breast cancer incidence and mortality up to 25 years later in 89 835 volunteer women aged 40-59 randomly assigned to mammography (five annual mammography screens) or control (no mammography) in 15 screening centres in six Canadian provinces, 1980-85 . . Women aged 40-49 in the mammography arm and all women aged 50-59 in both arms received annual physical breast examinations. Women aged 40-49 in the control arm received a single examination followed by usual care in the community. Main outcome measure Deaths from breast cancer. Results During the five year screening period, 666 invasive breast cancers were diagnosed in the mammography arm (n=44 925 participants) and 524 in the controls (n=44 910), and of these, 180 women in the mammography arm and 171 women in the control arm died of breast cancer during the 25 year follow-up period. The overall hazard ratio for death from breast cancer diagnosed during the screening period associated with mammography was 1.05 (95% confidence interval 0.85 to 1.30). in those aged 40-49 and 50-59 . During the entire study period, 3250 women in the mammography arm and 3133 in the control arm had a diagnosis of breast cancer, and 500 and 505, respectively, died of breast cancer. Thus the cumulative mortality from breast cancer was similar between women in the mammography arm and in the control arm (hazard ratio 0.99, 95% confidence interval 0.88 to 1.12). After 15 years of follow-up a residual excess of 106 cancers was observed in the mammography arm, attributable to over-diagnosis. Conclusion Annual mammography in women aged 40-59 does not reduce mortality from breast cancer beyond that of physical examination or usual care when adjuvant therapy for breast cancer is freely available. Overall, 22% (106/484) of screen detected invasive breast cancers were over-diagnosed, representing one over-diagnosed breast cancer for every 424 women who received mammography screening in the trial.
Editorial
Too much mammography 11 February 2014
BMJ 2014;348:g1403 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g1403 Mette Kalager,Hans-Olov Adami, Michael Bretthauer, Norway.
Long term follow-up does not support screening women under 60. Before being widely implemented, mammography screening was tested in randomised controlled trials in the 1960s to 80s. Meta-analyses of these trials showed a relative reduction in deaths from breast cancer of between 15% and 25% among women aged 50 to 69.1 2 3 Only the Canadian National Breast Screening Study showed no reduction in breast cancer mortality.1 2 3 This large randomised controlled trial compared physical breast examination with combined physical breast examination and annual mammography in women aged 40 to 59.1 2 3 In a linked paper (doi:10.1136/bmj.g366), Miller and colleagues present the results for up to 25 years of follow-up in the Canadian study.4 No difference in breast cancer mortality was observed between the mammography and control arms, whereas a significant excess incidence of invasive breast cancer was observed in the mammography arm, resulting in 22% overdiagnosis. This means that 22% of screen detected invasive cancers would not have reduced a woman’s life expectancy if left undetected. The major strengths of this study include its randomised design, intense intervention with five annual mammography screenings, high compliance, and complete, long term follow-up. The lack of mortality benefit is also biologically plausible because the mean tumour size was 19 mm in the screening group and 21 mm in the control group. This 2 mm difference—which might be even smaller if overdiagnosed cancers could be excluded from the screening group—represents a minimal proportion of the entire clinical course for breast tumours. But the trial also has some potential limitations. No quantitative data are available on the degree of contamination in the control arm or possible confounding by screening mammography after the trial. It seems unlikely, however, that such potential limitations would conceal a clinically important benefit. The rate of overdiagnosis did not include ductal carcinoma in situ, and the trial provides no data for women older than 60.
The Canadian study, launched in 1980, is the only trial to enroll participants in the modern era of routine adjuvant systemic treatment for breast cancer, and the women were educated in physical breast examination as advocated today.4 These important features may make this study more informative for a modern setting, compared with other randomised trials. The results of the study are strikingly similar—for both lack of efficacy and extent of overdiagnosis—to recent studies evaluating today’s screening programmes.5 6 7 The real amount of overdiagnosis in current screening programmes might be even higher than that reported in the Canadian study,4 because ductal carcinoma in situ, which accounts for one in four breast cancers detected in screening programmes,8 was not included in the analyses.
Other studies also indicate that improved treatment rather than screening is the reason for the decline in breast cancer mortality during the past four or five years.5 7 Even though different studies arrive at different reductions in breast cancer mortality (from 10% to 25%), these benefits translate to only marginal differences in absolute effects. Much larger variation is seen in the estimates of overdiagnosis.6 In studies based on statistical modelling, overdiagnosis was less than 5%.6 By contrast, most observational studies report higher estimates of overdiagnosis, ranging from 22% to 54%,6 depending on denominator used.9 When the number of breast cancers detected at screening is used as the denominator (as in the Canadian study), the amount of overdiagnosis observed in the previous randomised controlled trials is strikingly similar (22-24%).4 10
How do the data on mammography screening compare with data on prostate cancer screening by prostate specific antigen, which is currently not encouraged in the United Kingdom and other countries owing to its small effect on mortality and large risk of overdiagnosis (www.screening.nhs.uk/prostatecancer)? The figure on bmj.com shows that the absolute harms (overdiagnosis) and benefits (mortality reduction) are not very different between the screening types. The 20 year risk of breast cancer for a 50 year old woman is 6.1% with screening (including 22% overdiagnosis 4),11 and 5.0% without screening; and the corresponding numbers for prostate cancer in a 50 year old man are 3.9% with screening (including 45% overdiagnosis 12) and 2.7% without screening.11 The 20 year risk of death from cancer for a 55 year old woman is 1.5% with screening (assuming a 20% reduction in mortality2)11 and 1.9% without screening; and the corresponding numbers for prostate cancer in a 55 year old man are 1.0% with (assuming a 20% reduction in mortality12) and 1.3% without screening.11
Nevertheless, the UK National Screening Committee does recommend mammography screening for breast cancer but not prostate specific antigen screening for prostate cancer, stating that the “aim is to only implement programs that do more good than harm and that the informed choice is a guided principle of screening” (www.screening.nhs.uk/screening). Because the scientific rationale to recommend screening or not does not differ noticeably between breast and prostate cancer, political pressure and beliefs might have a role.
We agree with Miller and colleagues that “the rationale for screening by mammography be urgently reassessed by policy makers.” As time goes by we do indeed need more efficient mechanisms to reconsider priorities and recommendations for mammography screening and other medical interventions. This is not an easy task, because governments, research funders, scientists, and medical practitioners may have vested interests in continuing activities that are well established.
RESPONSES: 12 February 2014 BMJ 2014;348:g366 : 1. rebuttal by USA radiologists : Daniel B. Kopans, Professor of Radiology Harvard Medical School. Having been one of the experts called on in 1990 to review the quality of their mammograms I can personally attest to the fact that the quality was poor (1). To save money they used second hand mammography machines. The images were compromised by scatter since they did not employ grids for much of the trial. They failed to fully position the breasts in the machines so that cancers were missed because the technologists were not taught proper positioning, and their radiologists had no specific training in mammographic interpretation.
The CNBSS’s own reference physicist wrote:“..in my work as reference physicist to the NBSS, [I] identified many concerns regarding the quality of mammography carried out in some of the NBSS screening centers. That quality [in the NBSS] was far below state of the art, even for that time (early 1980’s). ” (2)
In this latest paper (3) the authors gloss over the fact that only 32% of the cancers were detected by mammography alone. This extremely low number is consistent with the poor quality of the mammography. At least two thirds of the cancers should be detected by mammography alone (4). In their accompanying editorial (5) Kalager and Adami admit that ” The lack of mortality benefit is also biologically plausible because the mean tumour size was 19 mm in the screening group and 21 mm in the control group….a 2 mm difference.” Poor quality mammography does not find breast cancers at a smaller size and earlier stage and would not be expected to reduce deaths.
The documented poor quality of the CNBSS mammography is sufficient to explain their results and all of the above disqualifies the CNBSS as a scientific study of mammography screening, but it was even worse than that. In order to be valid, randomized, controlled trials (RCT) require that assignment of the women to the screening group or the unscreened control group is totally random. A fundamental rule for an RCT is that nothing can be known about the participants until they have been randomly assigned so that there is no risk of compromising the random allocation. Furthermore, a system needs to be employed so that the assignment is truly random and cannot be compromised. The CNBSS violated these fundamental rules (6). Every woman first had a clinical breast examination by a trained nurse (or doctor) so that they knew the women who had breast lumps, many of which were cancers, and they knew the women who had large lymph nodes in their axillae indicating advanced cancer. Before assigning the women to be in the group offered screening or the control women they knew who had large incurable cancers. This was a major violation, but it went beyond that. Instead of a random system of assigning the women they used open lists. The study coordinators who were supposed to randomly assign the volunteers, probably with good, but misguided, intentions, could simply skip a line to be certain that the women with lumps and even advanced cancers got assigned to the screening arm to be sure they would get a mammogram. It is indisputable that this happened since there was a statistically significant excess of women with advanced breast cancers who were assigned to the screening arm compared to those assigned to the control arm (7). This guaranteed that there would be more early deaths among the screened women than the control women and this is what occurred in the NBSS. Shifting women from the control arm to the screening arm would increase the cancers in the screening arm and reduce the cancers in the control arm which would also account for what they claim is “overdiagnosis”. The analysis of the results from the CNBSS have been suspect from the beginning. The principle investigator ignored the allocation failure in his trial and blamed the early excess of cancer deaths among screened women on his, completely unsupportable, theory that cancer cells were being squeezed into the blood leading to early deaths. This had no scientific basis and was just another example of irresponsibility in the analysis of the data from this compromised trial and he finally retracted the nonsense after making front page headlines (6).
The compromise of the CNBSS trial is indisputable. The 5 year survival from breast cancer among women ages 40-49 in Canada in the 1980’s was only 75%, yet the control women in the CNBSS, who were supposed to represent the Canadian population at the time, had a greater than 90% five year survival. This could only happen if cancers were shifted from the control arm to the screening arm. The CNBSS is an excellent example of how to corrupt a randomized, controlled trial. Coupling the fundamental compromise of the allocation process with the documented poor quality of the mammography should, long ago, have disqualified the CNBSS as a legitimate trial of screening mammography. Anyone who suggests that it was properly done and its results are valid and should be used to reduce access to screening either does not understand the fundamentals, or has other motives for using its corrupted results.
2. confirmation: http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g366?tab=responses Per-Henrik Zahl, MD & statistician Norwegian Institute of Public Health. In this 30-year old study, the authors report no mortality reduction when screening with mammography and 22% overdiagnosis (1). The sensitivity of the mammography technique has improved tremendously in the last three decades. Ten years ago we got digital mammography and recently we have got tomosynthesis (2). The detection rate at mammography in the Canadian study was about 3 per 1000 in the second and later screening rounds (3). In digital mammography, the corresponding detection rate is 6 per 1000 screened woman and in tomosynthesis, the detection rate is 8 per 1000 (2). It could even have been higher if the pathologists had time to perform more biopsies (personal communications). In tomosynthesis a large number of stellate lesions appear, many more than in traditional mammography, and they are probably representing a reservoir of overdiagnosed breast cancers. In the last 15 years, the rate of interval cancer has been constant and is at the same level as in Canada 30 years ago (4). Thus, the level of overdiagnosis is far much bigger today than in Canada 30 years ago.
update 6 Feb 2014 This column has noted that in the 2012 report of the the giant ATLAS (and aTTom) trials in 37 countries the past decade (discussed in detail below), despite the claimed 80% cure rate of early silent breast cancer (diagnosed by mammography screening at around 55yrs), by 15 years after repeated screening mammography- surgery-radiotherapy, tamoxifen for 5 or 10 years and annual screening mammography followup, of the women who had died by age 70yrs and had autopsy, some 43% had (silent) recurrence of breast cancer- although this had been detected in far fewer living women. The 15 year ATLAS results overall were depressing- in those originally early silent estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers, although only about 20% had clinical recurrence by a mean age of 70yrs, of the 22% who had died by then, almost half ie 43% had recurrence of breast cancer at autopsy.
How successful was tamoxifen versus placebo?
Why was the Atlas trial felt not to justify a no-tamoxifen control group?
Sir Richard Peto’s earlier Oxford review (Horm Res 1989;32:165) Effects of Adjuvant Tamoxifen and of Cytotoxic Therapy on Mortality in Early Breast Cancer. An Overview of 61 Randomised Trials Among 28,896 Women sought information worldwide on mortality according to assigned treatment in all randomised trials that began before 1985 of adjuvant tamoxifen or cytotoxic therapy for early breast cancer (with or without regional lymph node involvement). Coverage was reasonably complete for most countries. In 28 trials of tamoxifen nearly 4,000 of 16,513 women had died, reductions in mortality due to treatment were significant when tamoxifen was compared with no tamoxifen (p < 0.0001), any chemotherapy with no chemotherapy (p=0.003), and polychemotherapy with single-agent chemotherapy (p=0.001). In tamoxifen trials, there was a clear reduction in mortality only among women aged 50 or older, for whom assignment to tamoxifen reduced the annual odds of death during the first 5 years by about one fifth. In chemotherapy trials there was a clear reduction only among women under 50, for whom assignment to polychemotherapy reduced the annual odds of death during the first 5 years by about one quarter. Direct comparisons showed that combination chemotherapy was significantly more effective than single-agent therapy. Because it involved several thousand women, this overview was able to demonstrate particularly clearly that both tamoxifen and cytotoxic therapy can reduce five-year mortality.
A decade later the 1998
Tamoxifen for early breast cancer: overview of the randomised trials: Oxford
Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group
(The Lancet, 1998: 351,: 1451 – 1467) confirmed Peto’s review:
In 1995, information was sought on each woman in any randomised trial that began before 1990 of adjuvant tamoxifen versus no tamoxifen before recurrence on 37 000 women in 55 such trials, comprising about 87% of the worldwide evidence. Compared with the previous such overview, this approximately doubles the amount of evidence from trials of about 5 years of tamoxifen and, taking all trials together, on events occurring more than 5 years after randomisation.
Nearly 8000 of the women had a low, or zero, level of the oestrogen-receptor protein (ER) measured in their primary tumour. Among them, the overall effects of tamoxifen appeared to be small, and subsequent analyses of recurrence and total mortality are restricted to the remaining women (18 000 with ER-positive tumours, plus nearly 12 000 more with untested tumours, of which an estimated 8000 would have been ER-positive). For trials of 1 year, 2 years, and about 5 years of adjuvant tamoxifen, the proportional recurrence reductions produced among these 30 000 women during about 10 years of follow-up were 21% (SD 3), 29% (SD 2), and 47% (SD 3), respectively, with a highly significant trend towards greater effect with longer treatment (χ21=52·0, 2p<0·00001). The corresponding proportional mortality reductions were 12% (SD 3), 17% (SD 3), and 26% (SD 4), respectively, and again the test for trend was significant (χ21= 8·8, 2p=0·003). The absolute improvement in recurrence was greater during the first 5 years, whereas the improvement in survival grew steadily larger throughout the first 10 years. The proportional mortality reductions were similar for women with node-positive and node-negative disease, but the absolute mortality reductions were greater in node-positive women. In the trials of about 5 years of adjuvant tamoxifen the absolute improvements in 10-year survival were 10·9% (SD 2·5) for node-positive (61·4% vs 50·5% survival, 2p<0·00001) and 5·6% (SD 1·3) for node-negative (78·9% vs 73·3% survival, 2p<0·00001). These benefits appeared to be largely irrespective of age, menopausal status, daily tamoxifen dose (which was generally 20 mg), and of whether chemotherapy had been given to both groups. In terms of other outcomes among all women studied (ie, including those with “ER-poor” tumours), the proportional reductions in contralateral breast cancer were 13% (SD 13), 26% (SD 9), and 47% (SD 9) in the trials of 1, 2, or about 5 years of adjuvant tamoxifen. The incidence of endometrial cancer was approximately doubled in trials of 1 or 2 years of tamoxifen and approximately quadrupled in trials of 5 years of tamoxifen (although the number of cases was small and these ratios were not significantly different from each other). The absolute decrease in contralateral breast cancer was about twice as large as the absolute increase in the incidence of endometrial cancer. Tamoxifen had no apparent effect on the incidence of colorectal cancer or, after exclusion of deaths from breast or endometrial cancer, on any of the other main categories of cause of death (total nearly 2000 such deaths; overall relative risk 0·99 [SD 0·05]).
So the dilemma for health professionals, and for the target of the zealous Cancer Screening Industry- healthy women in their prime-of-life middle years- remains: why have xray mammography screening when the independent evidence from expert epidemiologists is that screening mammograpy to find preclinical ie precancer does not in fact meaningfully save lives, entend health or reduce breast surgery and cancer therapy, it actually increases all these risks compared to waiting till cancer presents clinically. Zahl Jorgensen and Gotzsche in their latest review show that Overestimated lead times in cancer screening has led to substantial underestimation of overdiagnosis.
Hence Regulators in most countries have reduced recommendations for routine screening mammography to starting at age >50yrs and stopping by 70-75years (ie 10-12 times on average through midlife); whereas Radiology Associations ignore the risks and still advise screening annually from age 40 years, for life – ie at least THREE times as many times from age 40years. So women are doubly exposed to harmful pressure both in being bullied that they need screening xray mammography – the lie that ” screening mammography saves lives” when the benefit of this is unproven, and in being forced to undergo breast crushing repeatedly. A woman who recently attended for Sure Touch in Port Elizabeth objected to having her breasts snackwiched again by compression mammography. The flippant analogy is eerie when one considers how such women are expected to attend annually to have their breasts both flattened and irradiated – and more so with cumulative frying after therapeutic radiotherapy. No wonder some end up with a hard breast. . So while the young at heart may love nudging breasts-, and massage heals, (and Bissell and Fletcher at the Berkley lab show that gentle nudging with about 50 gm pressure knocks errant breast ductal cells back into healthy behaviour) – crushing force and coersion do women harm, not good; in contrast to men where forceful digital massage may (also with putative risk) relieve the infected painful prostate.. .
And
Gøtzsche and Jørgensen in .
Cochrane Database Syst Rev. have Jun 4 published update stats against
Screening for breast cancer with mammography “
from PubMed and the WHO ‘s International Clinical Trials Registry (to November 2012). Eight eligible trials included 600,000 women in the age range 39 to 74 years. Three trials with adequate randomisation did not show a statistically significant reduction in breast cancer mortality at 13 years (relative risk (RR) 0.90); four trials with suboptimal randomisation showed a significant reduction in breast cancer mortality with an RR of 0.75 (95% CI 0.67 to 0.83). The RR for all seven trials combined was 0.81 (95% CI 0.74 to 0.87). We found that breast cancer mortality was an unreliable outcome that was biased in favour of screening, mainly from differential misclassification of cause of death. The trials with adequate randomisation did not find an effect of screening on total cancer mortality, including breast cancer, after 10 years (RR 1.02, 95% CI 0.95 to 1.10) or on all-cause mortality after 13 years (RR 0.99, 95% CI 0.95 to 1.03). Surgeries – Lumpectomies and mastectomies (RR 1.20-1.31, 95% CI 1.08 to 1.42) were significantly more in the screened groups . The use of radiotherapy was similarly increased whereas there was no difference in the use of chemotherapy. AUTHORS’ CONCLUSIONS: If we assume that screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 15% and that overdiagnosis and overtreatment is at 30%, it means that for every 2000 women invited for screening through 10 years, one will avoid dying of breast cancer and 10 healthy women, who would not have been diagnosed if there had not been screening, will be treated unnecessarily. Furthermore, more than 10% will experience important psychological distress including anxiety and uncertainty for years because of false positive findings. To help ensure that the women are fully informed before they decide whether or not to attend screening, we have an evidence-based lay leaflet http://www.cochrane.dk. Because of substantial advances in treatment and greater breast cancer awareness since the trials, it is likely that the absolute effect of screening today is smaller than in the trials. Recent observational studies show more overdiagnosis than in the trials and very little or no reduction in the incidence of advanced cancers with screening”. update 26 May 2013 Apart from the strident promotion of preventative mastectomy by a film star, reports the past week prompt review of : why and whether aggressive breast cancer may have doubled in young women 25-39years old; and it’s prevention by natural steps.
update 22 May 2013:
WHY DO SO MANY WOMEN HAVE RELAPSE OF BREAST CANCER BY 25 YEARS AFTER DIAGNOSIS AND APPARENTLY CURATIVE TREATMENT OF EARLY SILENT BREAST CANCER?:three landmark new papers shine more light on why 43% of women who died by 15 years after aggressive treatment of initial silent preclinical breast cancer had relapse/recurrence of breast cancer at autopsy – the depressing result of the monumental 180 000 women-year
ATLAS trial:
Lisa Willis, Karen Page, Trevor Graham, Tomás Alarcón, Malcolm Alison & Ian Tomlinson from Universities of London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Barcelona this month dissect “What Can Be Learnt about Disease Progression in Breast Cancer Dormancy from Relapse Data? why Breast cancer patients have an anomalously high rate of relapse up to 25 years after apparently curative surgery removed the primary tumour. Disease progression during the intervening years between resection and relapse is poorly understood. There is evidence that the disease persists as dangerous, tiny metastases that remain at a growth restricted, clinically undetectable size until a transforming event restarts growth. This suggests a natural question and a surprising answer: why are interesting trends in long-term relapse data not more commonly observed?” But they are observed: another recent 15 year followup study, from Denmark (Grantzau ea), furthermore shows that DXRT after early breast cancer almost doubles the risk of radiotherapy-associated second cancer to 1:200 of women so treated..
Thus at least dangerous dormant micrometastases, and the enormous cumulative radiation exposure from both screening mammography over decades, and DXRT itself, will explain much of the 43% recurrence rate of breast cancer by 15 years (at autopsy in those who had died by then, at a mean of only 70 years) seen in the ATLAS trial.
These reports raise yet further doubts about the wisdom of regular mass xrayscreening of well breasts from age 50 years let alone 40years, and worse- zealous major surgery and DXRT for preclinical disease, and then even worse, ongoing xray mammographic surveillance into old age.
They point in the opposite direction: that xray screening of well breasts should be avoided; DXRT avoided in localized early breast cancer; and surveillance for breast cancer limited to the many available non-xray methods;
and that women must be encouraged instead to maintain prevention with combination of safe natural (and multisystem-protecting) means as discussed repeatedly in this column – lifestyle, diet, exercise, and massage and oral use of safe natural preventative supplements. Anticancer antiangiogenesis factors from our diet are legion, include cannabis, mushrooms, resveratrol, green tea, black rasberry and Royal jelly. One would not recommend soya against breast cancr because of its phytoestrogen potential.
Xradiation has been known for decades eg 1978 1990 to be both an angiogenic and an antiangiogenic factor in tumour growth angiogenesis (Judah Folkman 1971) . so it is obviously a double-edged sword that should certainly not be used in the witchhunt for silent and usually irrelevant precancer in well breasts.
So we have the ludicrous situation reported today in JAMA that despite all the evidence for 20 years now to stop or at least halve mass xray screening and thus (over)treatment of silent early breast cancer, “Physicians, Patients Not Following Advice From USPSTF on Mammography Screening: In 2009, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommended against routine screening mammography for women under 50 years and advised biennial rather than annual screening for women aged over 49yrs. But women and physicians ignored these recommendations. A new study from Harvard found that in 2005 to 2011, the percentage of women aged 40 to 49 years reporting that they had undergone mammography screening in the previous year was the same, about 47%. As for women aged 50 to 74 years, the percentage reporting mammography screening in the previous 12 months for each year analyzed also remained essentially the same, in the upper 50% range.”
Update 21 April 2013: FIFTEEN YEAR FOLLOWUP STUDIES OF BREAST CANCER AND ALLCAUSE MORTALITY FROM MENOPAUSE ONWARDS: Overall, long-term studies do not favour invasive breast screening or adjuvant therapy of early breast cancer, but actually argue against early diagnosis and treatment of both silent breast and prostate cancer. Rather, the focus must be on safe natural prevention to reduce the occurrence of all common degenerative diseases of aging.
It is instructive to juxtapose the diverse 15 year followup studies in 14 countries (
Nordic Cochrane- Gotzsche, Jorgensen ea) of women routinely xray- mammography screened or not, with the
15 year ATLAS study (that ended in 2010) reviewed below in 36 countries, of women zealously xray- screened for early breast cancer, prompt biopsies and surgical/ radiotherapy treatment- the majority mastectomy- and then randomized to tamoxifen for up to 10 years. and it is reported by the ATLAS authors that there was a major breach of protocol –
The protocol stated that 20 000 patients would need to be randomised in ATLAS and the other trials of tamoxifen duration to detect reliably an absolute difference of 2–3% in mortality. Entry to ATLAS was halted in 2005 (with 12 894 patients, including 6846 with ER-positive disease) because the MA.17 trial showed benefit from continued endocrine treatment after 5 years of tamoxifen.. Yet the MA17 trial was with a different drug- letrozole; and bizarely
, the trial conclusion was that
“the results from the analyses based on the Cox model with time-dependent covariates were similar for letrozole and placebo.” ie that letrozole was no better than placebo.. Thus, like the Womens’ Health Initiative misguided early termination, it is unclear why MA17 was used as reason to terminate the ATLAS trial.
The 15 year ATLAS results overall were depressing- in those originally early silent estrogen-receptor positive breast cancers, although only about 20% had clinical recurrence by a mean age of 70yrs, of the 22% who had died by then, almost half ie 43% had recurrence of breast cancer at autopsy.
Many new such trials are under way.
The aTTom trial the UK arm of the ATLAS trial similarly “followed women with early breast cancer after initial treatment for about 15 years: it randomly assigned 6934 women (39% ER-positive, 61% ER-untested) at the completion of 4 or more years of tamoxifen therapy to either 5 additional years of tamoxifen or cessation of tamoxifen therapy. With a median follow-up of 4.2 years, there was a slight, non-significant advantage for the 10-year tamoxifen arm (RR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.81–1.09; P = .4). Thus, the optimal duration of therapy is not known, but it is at least 5 years”. For undisclosed reasons this trial has apparently never been published in full although it was first reported in 2008- this raises the usual question by eg
Booth and Tannock 2008 of bias against negative results, whether there was suppression by sponsors
… And the aTTom trial design was
heavily criticised at the outset in 1996.
The
meta-analysis published the past week by Heidi Nelson ea for the USPSTF confirms the ATLAS study, showed that tamoxifen/ raloxifen for 5 years reduced absolute mortality from breast cancer by about 0.16% per year.
Neither reduced breast cancer-specific or all-cause mortality rates. Both reduced the incidence of fractures, but tamoxifen increased the incidence of thromboembolic events more than raloxifene by 4 cases in 1000 women. Tamoxifen increased the incidence of endometrial cancer and cataracts compared with placebo and raloxifene. Trials provided limited and heterogeneous data on medication adherence and persistence. Many women do not take tamoxifen because of associated harms. It then becomes apparent that having early breast cancer detected – without the adverse risk factors of xray mammography of repeated breast crushing, radiation, biopsies and overtreatement, but with better application of safe preventative measures including vitamin D3, melatonin, metformin, iodine, DMSO, coconut oil, fish oil, sutherlandia, I3C/DIM, vitamins and minerals – while women will live healthy longer, few women (perhaps <5% of all deaths) will die of breast cancer. The common risk factors (for all common premature disease and deaths) are m anaged with the same basket of safe natural effective preventatives including supplements like appropriate balanced hormone replacement -that this column addresses.
Dr. Northrup says“[Gilbert Welch] pointed to a study [from] way back, of women who died in car accidents in their 40s. They sectioned their breast tissues and found that 40 percent of them – this is normal healthy women dying in car accidents – had evidence of ductal carcinoma in situ that was never going to go anywhere. This is the big dilemma,” . Welch and Black 1997 reported
Among seven autopsy series of women not known to have had breast cancer during life, the median prevalence of invasive breast cancer was 1.3% (range, 0% to 1.8%) and the median prevalence of DCIS was 8.9% (range, 0% to 14.7%). Prevalences were higher among women likely to have been screened (that is, women 40 to 70 years of age).
Erbas ea at Univ Melbourne studied all sources for the prevalence of ductal carcinoma in situ. “The reported prevalence of undiagnosed DCIS in autopsy studies, of approximately 9%, has been used to suggest a larger reservoir of DCIS may exist in the population”.
Update 18 April 2013: a new study from Italy graphically illustrates the lower sensitivity of xray screening – U/S ie ultrasound picked up ‘significantly’ more tiny asymptomatic breast cancers missed in 22,131 women with negative mammography. “The overall U/S detection was 0.185%, but 0.55% with previous cancer vs 0.145% in women without cancer history (p = 0.0004), 0.22% in dense breasts (p = 0.17) vs .156% in fatty breasts. The U/S- generated invasive assessment was 0.19% The benign to malignant open surgical biopsy ratio was thus 0.17.” This is likely more overdiagnosis unless the women simply apply the preventative measures recommended below.
But while no screening method can diagnose cancer (only invasive biopsy can), and none can guarantee there arnt cancer cells busy germinating especially if stirred up by severe anxiety, radiation, crushing, biopsy etc, Sure Touch mapping is more accurate than even U/S for reassuring while reducing referral rate for U/S.
UPDATE 14 APRIL 2013: Because of the evidence the past score years set out below that xray screening actually does more harm than good, integrative medical clinics world wide do not promote xray screening mammography. But such clinics including in Cape Town generally offer regular safe and lower-cost anatomical eg Sure Touch mechanical tactile if not ultrasound or MRI, and physiological no-touch eg thermography ie bloodflow studies, – for those who need peace of mind. Some women choose to alternate Sure Touch and thermomammography.
While only 1 in 200 women have the familial gene risk, the majority of older women have the common multiple risk factors eg longevity, estrogenic and heavy metal pollution, stress, overweight density, smoking, alcohol; and there are many simple remedies described in these columns that can reverse most of the risk factors – not just of even genetic breast cancer and increasing overweight, but of all the major diseases of aging.
The problem remains the stubbornness of third party payers including governments to listen to both the evidence and to womens’ wishes, and pay for such safe, cheaper and arguably more accurate prscreening than crush xray mammography, if any is desired or desirable .
Dr Johnnie Ham MD MSc MBA Californian ObGyn discusses why xray screening mammography and aggressive medical assault on well breasts- the witchhunt for the pot of hidden gold, silent preclinical breast cancer – is a giant con by the for-profit high-tech medical goliath industry terrorizing and mutilating naive women.
Governments -WHO silence on harms of screening mammography : What is tragicomedy is that worldwide, government Regulators seem to be standing silently firm, not saying a word about the harm likely exceeding the medical benefit- the screening and cancer industry is far too profitable in jobs, taxes and votes. Search on the internet for Government warnings on harms of screening mammography does not yield a word of warning. Regulators and Medical Schemes piously promote quality screening, but say nothing about the harms versus benefits. The FDA still promotes annual screening mammography on line without a word about the risks and harms of mammography; others like the UK NHS promote it every 2 to 3 years. Yet the US Senate is actually considering a Republican Act to promote more xray breast imaging.
UPDATE 12 April 2013 The Wiki entry on breast cancer prognosis says now: “One result of media hype- breast cancer’s high visibility -(compared to other cancers in eg men, and other common major diseases) is that statistics may be misinterpreted, such as the claim that breast cancer will be diagnosed in one in eight women during their lives—a claim that depends on the unrealistic assumption that no woman will die of any other disease before the age of 95.[132] This obscures reality that about ten more women will die from heart disease or stroke than from breast cancer.[133]The emphasis on breast cancer screening may be harming women by subjecting them to unnecessary radiation, biopsies, and surgery. One-third of diagnosed breast cancers might recede on their own.[134] Screening mammography efficiently finds non-life-threatening, asymptomatic breast cancers and pre-cancers, even while overlooking serious cancers. According to Prof Gilbert Welch of Dartmouth Institute, research on screening mammography has taken the “brain-dead approach that says the best test is the one that finds the most cancers” rather than the one that finds dangerous cancers.[134]
The latest report Lancet 2011) on the Relevance of breast cancer hormone receptors and other factors to efficacy of Tamoxifen protection after breast cancer looked at 20 trials (n=21,457) in early breast cancer . In oestrogen receptor (ER)-positive disease, about 5 years of tamoxifen halved recurrence rates throughout the first 10 years but no further gain or loss after year 10; risk was approximately independent of progesterone receptor status (or level), age, nodal status, or use of chemotherapy. Breast cancer mortality was reduced by about a third throughout the first 15 years. Overall non-breast-cancer mortality was little affected, despite small absolute increases in thromboembolic and uterine cancer mortality (both only in women older than 55 years), so all-cause mortality was substantially reduced. In ER-negative disease, tamoxifen had little or no effect on breast cancer recurrence or mortality.
This is not surprising as tamoxifen like all synthetic sex hormones /blockers has a long list of adverse effects on bone, brain, cardiovascular, bladder, mood, immunity, body weight and metabolism, womb etc.
But the Oxford UK-led (Davies ea) landmark monumental ATLAS trial (2012) from 1996 -2010 in 36 countries and 180 000 women-years (mean presentation age mid 50s, ER+ breast cancer about 1 cm size, 2/3 had mastectomy – which is now known to increase mortality) showed that after 6846 women taking tamoxifen for up to 10 years, at about 15 years from diagnosis, tamoxifen in absolute terms was only marginal benefit- marginally reduced the risk for breast cancer recurrence, compared with stopping tamoxifen (617 vs 711; P = .002), reduced breast cancer mortality relatively by 8% (331 vs 397 deaths; P = .01) but that’s only about 1% in absolute terms, and reduced overall mortality by 10% (639 vs 722 deaths; P = .01). Over all, approximately 1/5 clinically relapsed, 1/7 deaths were from breast cancer; but of those who died, webfigures 4a and 4b of the supplementary appendix of the main ATLAS report showed that at autopsy almost half (43%) indeed had recurrent breast cancer. This gives the lie to early screening and treatment- 15 years later, even with tamoxifen for 10 years, early xray mammography detection and conventional surgical-radio-chemotherapy treatment does not cure much more than half of women with preclinical ER+ breast cancer that screening detects.The risk for recurrence by year 15 was 21.4% in the continuers group and 25.1% in the control group. ie only 3.7% absolute reduction. In addition, breast cancer mortality by year 15 was significantly reduced by nearly 3%; it was 12.2% in the continuers group and 15.0% in the control group. ie only 2.8% absolute reduction. Thus even in these women with early breast cancer, the cure rate even with tamoxifen was poor- slight reduction in the 25% recurrence and 15% breast cancer mortality rates. But almost half of the women who died had recurrence. Once again, the actual results published 4 months ago in the final Lancet report were much less impressive than the media release published 5 days later. Of these >6000 women allocated after initial surgery/ radio/chemotherapy to the tamoxifen or placebo trial, 85% did not die of breast cancer. But the cure rate was at best still only about 75%, and only half of those who died -by a mean of age 70 years – of any causes were free of breast cancer.
11 April 2013 the SA Menopause Society Menopause Matters today also features The Great Mammography Debate- concluding “The point being that the treatments of breast cancer are not benign and need to be drawn into the calculations when assessing the harms of screening mammography. If these treatments are carried out on a significant number of people who are not in danger of being harmed by their breast cancer in the first place (those over-diagnosed) then the scales of benefit versus harm from routine mammography may well tip in favour of harm. If so it may be unwise or even unethical to recommend screening by mammography.”
9 April 2013 Robert Stern at University of Arizona writes that “xray mammography alone is not a very good screening modality and has strikingly variable false positive, false negative, specificity, and efficacy rates, depending on what you read and who you believe.
Worldwide, the days of simple repetitive yearly/ biannual mammograms for every living woman over some arbitrary age may be over soon.. breast cancer screening is about to evolve into a personalized, patient-centered program. It means you can’t just order a mammogram when a flag pops up saying it’s time. It means understanding fairly complex risk stratification, the indications for these new technologies, and the clinical context for various imaging strategies”, mostly still based on irradiation; as detailed in the American Medical Journal by
Drukteinis ea at the Florida Mofitt Cancer Centre ..
8 April 2013: UPDATE: see vitamin D3 and Breast Cancer.
JAMA publishes on line from University Basel Switzerland, Shaw and Elger’s viewpoint on Evidence-Based Persuasion, often an ethical imperative to forcefully guide a hesitant patient into what seems to be the best decision, using arguments from Removal of Bias to Recommending Options and occasionally even Creating New Biases. The eternal problem remains, what is truly right? Is mass flu vaccine right? Is screening xray mammography truly lifesaving? especially if one quotes impressive but misleading relative risk reduction rather than in fact the crucial trivial absolute reduction? Is Directive Counselling however well-meant exercising undue influence? They conclude that it is an essential part of modern medical practice, without which it may be impossible to respect patients’ autonomy. Such necessary persuasion needs to meet 6 criteria.
A month ago BCAction held a webinar reported by Manie Clark
updating the risks and futility of screening xray mammography.
24 Mar 2013.
THE COVERUP OF HARMS AND FUTILITY OF XRAY BREAST SCREENING CONTINUES IN USA:
Many opinions from around the world in recent NEJMs say it all about screening mammography: most are subjective, emotive. There is no impartial objective evidence to support the gold standard xray mammography at all (except arguably in cases of obvious cancer- when biopsy, and MRI scan is better and safer). When there are acceptable prescreenings that do no harm and when combined, give good sensitivity and specificity eg any two of mechanical tactile imaging, thermomammography, breast ultrasound and (if affordable) MRI.
Karla Kerlikowske ea co-author already four peer-reviewed Pubmed-listed studies on xray mammography this year..
the latest on screening well women from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium asks:
Screening Outcomes in Older US Women Undergoing Multiple Mammograms in Community Practice: Does Interval, Age, or Comorbidity Score Affect Tumor Characteristics or False Positive Rates?Uncertainty exists about appropriate use of screening mammography among older women because comorbid illnesses may diminish the benefit of screening. We examined the risks from 1999 to 2006 on 140000 women aged 66 to 89 years at study entry undergoing mammo . About 7% had breast cancer, in a data linkage between the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium and Medicare claims. Cumulative probability of a false-positive mammo result was higher among annual screeners than biennial screeners irrespective of comorbidity: 48% of annual screeners aged 66 to 74 years had a false-positive result compared with 29% of biennial screeners. These women who undergo biennial screening mammo had similar risk of advanced-stage disease and lower cumulative risk of a false-positive recommendation than annual screeners, regardless of comorbidity. But their abstract abysmally fails to ask and answer the obviously far more important question: – did screening mammo give any significantly lower mortality, surgery or radiotherapy at 15 or 20year followup compared to a matched randomly selected cohort not screened over the same period, or compared to women who were screened only once at the outset??
All independent studies show that women regularly screened by xray mammogram do no better and sustain far more harms, in fact may die sooner than those not screened. Why did they not say this in their abstract, that xray mammo screening is unethical abusive harmful exploitation of women?
The
BCSC website registers over 8million screening mammograms done there 1996-2009 – 24% of women had 5 or more xray screens- ` yet similarly fails to mention the crucial harms and mortality data in screened versus unscreened women. The reason is obvious: admitting the truth, that xray screening mammo is not only futile but harmful, would kill what must now be a $10billion a year industry in USA for xray manufacturers, radiologists, breast surgeons, hospitals, medical schemes, oncologists and Big Pharma in the Find a Hidden Breast Cancer Conspiracy against older women. . Indeed, the endgame would be that lawyers will swarm to call on women to sue the Breast Cancer Industry for wrongful assault.
23 Mar 2013Dr Enza Ferreri is a London-based Italian journalist philosopher of science, christian human and animal rights activist, including saving Britain from an Islamist President Charles Windsor.. She yesterday wrote a devastating
critique of screening xray mammography, its profiteering oversell by Scandinavian and English-speaking governments’ propaganda that omit to explain all the risks and lack of benefits. “
On one side you have the stories about women whose ” life was saved” by breast screening, on the other women whose life was made hell by discovery of a possibly benign DCIS, and those who endure a nightmare of false positives believing that she has breast cancer when she hasn’t. “
22 Mar 2013 Even this month’s
European Radiology Congress, and
the South African Menopause Society SAMS newsletter Menopause Matters, and the Annals of Family Medicine – a new Copenhagen study- now question screening xray mammography, including cumulative radiation damage to heart and lungs; and chronic psychological trauma from false positive reports.
the SAMS author says: ” the fundamental question is “Does screening for cancer improve length or quality of life?” The latest arguments from the UK ask if screening saves lives, if you take all causes of death into account (Baum BMJ 2013;346:f385). Firstly, the author accepts that screening saves lives. If 10 000 women are screened for a decade then 4 deaths will be avoided. As treatments improve as they are doing all the time, then deaths avoided become lower, maybe 2 per 10 000 in the near future and thus screening becomes less valuable… current data about survival need to be used when making calculations about prolonging life.
Secondly, overdiagnosis is important because if some women who do not have life-threatening disease are treated, they may die from the treatment. Mastectomy, radiation, chemo- or endocrine therapy are not trivial treatments. Surgery carries anaesthetic and sepsis possibilities, especially in obese patients. Radiation is not without its risks, raising the incidence of ischaemic heart disease 27% and of lung cancer 78%. These risks would be worth taking if there were no cases of overdiagnosis – but there are – somewhere between 10% and 50% -so any lives saved may be cancelled out by deaths caused. So with all-cause mortality no longer showing benefit, it devolves to other factors such as the positive peace of mind screening provides or the negative over-investigation of false positives to sway decisions for or against screening. No wonder the editor of the BMJ (26th January 2013) asks “At what stage must we seriously consider whether this screening is a good use of £96m of NHS budget?” So how should we advise our patients? The statistics show the “lives saved” argument is neutralized. The cost of screening, time involved and morbidity from false positive tests are all non-fatal harms so these have to be weighed against peace of mind of a negative result and these calculations are in the mind of the beholder. The parallels with prostate specific antigen screening are uncanny and PSA testing is rapidly falling into disfavour or even disrepute. It seems those with vested interests are those promoting mammography screening. The moral position of doctors is becoming increasingly complex – can it be correct to say mammography screening in low-risk women is “the right thing to do”?
16 Mar 2013 Recently
Bateman in Cape Town suggests
“PinkDrive intervention ‘over-rated’ : Breast health professionals are questioning the life-saving impact of the high profile non-profit breast cancer organisation PinkDrive.“
The
Pink Drive website opens with some fallacies eg that: xray mammo 23kg
breast compression causes no pain or damage – wrong
; that
It is a tool to diagnose breast cancer“- wrong-only histology does; and that
diagnostic breast irradiation is no risk after age 40years ; wrong- this column has quoted authoritative
opinion and research eg Lemay, Sherbrooke Univ 2011 to the contrary, the
linear no-threshold model, although Mina Bissell’s Berkley Lab 2011
research paper perhaps contradicts this – the jury is still out . .
It is significant that of the seven Platinum
Pink Drive sponsors, two are private Hospital chains with major vested interest in the Breast Cancer Surgery and Reconstruction Industry.
Contrary to the Pink Drive website stating that mammograms diagnose breast cancer, a
major new study from Japan on xray mammography of almost 120000 women found histological
cancer in 0.22% of those who underwent mammography alone, 0.37% of those who underwent ultrasonography alone, and 0.5% of the 974 participants who underwent both mammography and ultrasonography. Recall rate due to mammographic abnormalities was 4.9% for women screened only with mammography and 2.6% for those screened with both modalities. The cancer detection rate was 0.22% for women screened only with mammography and 0.31% for those screened with both modalities. Their conclusion that
It is possible to reduce the recall rate in screening mammography by combining mammography and ultrasonography for breast screening is precisely the point, that hazardous xray mammography screening with its immediate and longterm risks is not needed when any two of the three well-tested lowcost zero-risk portable facilities are available eg Sure Touch Mechanical Tactile imaging,
thermomammgraphy, and ultrasound, and two combined give high sensitivity and specificity.
Neither of the above new abstracts raised the issue of overdiagnosis or longterm hazards.. In fact the NCI Nat Cancer Institute Journal itself published a study this month from San Fran
University California showing that in 140 000 women from 66years upward screened between 1999 and 2006,
Cumulative probability of a false-positive mammography result was higher among annual screeners than biennial screeners irrespective of comorbidity: 48% of annual screeners aged 66 to 74 years had a false-positive result compared with 29% of biennial screeners. Women aged 66 to 89 years who undergo biennial screening mammography have similar risk of advanced-stage disease and lower cumulative risk of a false-positive recommendation than annual screeners, regardless of comorbidity. Thus even cancer comes and go. Reducing xray screening in USA to every second year reduced the frequency of false positive recall – overdiagnosis – from almost half – 48% – by above one third, without increase in advanced cancer.
A
Comparative Table shows the many methods, procedures for objective breast imaging (mammography) available. Of the established procedures it lacks only comparison with the gold standard- the oldest ie manual clinical examination- and with forty year old
Infrared Thermography. As this column has stressed previously, mammography is not a patented word for xray breast imaging, it is simply a generic description of breast (mammo-) and image (-gram) . Any image of the breast is thus a mammo-gram, and the process is mammo-graphy.
SCREENING METHODS COMPARATIVE TABLE:
this table shows the relative merits of some different methods of breast imaging. Mechanical Tactile Sure Touch Imaging leads the field for combined sensitivity and specificity, portability, all-age utility without problems of breast density interference, cost, risks and reproducible mapping. Like a photograph, a plaster or other cast of the bust would thus also be a mammogram image- and unlike plastic surgeons, dermatologists and thermographers, other health professionals and patients alike too often forget to record a photograph to compare changes in the skin and breast serially. .
NEJM 28 Feb from Harvard, Adler and Colbert’s
“Mammography Screening Poll Results” is a sobering commentary on the health professionals’ wrong perceptions about routine X-ray mammography screening of all well breasts from midlife. What do readers say about the indisputable overwhelming independent evidence against routine X-ray screening mammography?
One has to question the rationality of most NEJM readers – surprisingly few in total – who responded to the poll after
Bleyer and Welch’s ,
Mette Kalager’s ,
Baum,
Jorgensen and
Gotzsche’s publications last year, that the majority of NEJM readers polled still promote X-ray screening despite the hard evidence, the absence of benefit from screening irradiation of well breasts- significant reduction in mortality in such women – in the face of multiple hazards of such screening.
The risks, the list of hazards – in five broad categories – is so great that as pointed out below last month, not even the NCI National Cancer Institute itself any longer clearly promotes routine X-ray mammography screening. As Colbert and Adler and the 2nd Canadian mammography trial 20 yrs ago noted (Miller and Baines) , the evidence for presymptomatic screening X-ray mammo is no better than clinical digital exam. Early diagnosis of silent breast precancer by xray screening and biopsy does not save lives, it is a vast waste of money except for the career Breast Industry, that has been characterized as terrorizing and damaging gullible submissive women (Winifred Cutler, Athena Inst).
There are certainly many safe natural ways we reviewed recently of reversing the risks of breast proliferation and cancer, thus justifying periodic safe low cost breast screening – mammo-imaging – by independent eg digital, mechanical tactile ” Sure Touch ” , ultrasound and/ or thermo- means.26 Feb 2013. There is a flood of new progress against breast disease , breast cancer and xray screening mammography: Contrary to the for-profit Breast industry, like all independent authorities including the Cancer Association of South Africa CANSA , the National Cancer Institute of America in 2013 no longer recommends routine xray mammography screening- it rates the EVIDENCE on X-ray screening mammography as FAIR evidence for its sole and arguable benefit – Decrease in total and breast cancer mortality – -*Consistency of studies is only Fair. External Validity: Good. Internal Validity: Variable,. But as GOOD evidence for the FIVE major HARMS of xray screening -* both consistency, internal & external validity -are good –
- Discomfort if not cellular rupture and bruising from violent 23 kg 50 lb crushing,
- Overdiagnosis and Resulting Treatment – including mastectomy or radiochemotherapy- of Insignificant Cancers:
- False-Positives with Additional Testing and Anxiety.
- False-Negatives with False senseof Security and Potential Delay in Cancer Diagnosis.
- Radiation-Induced Breast Cancer.
Winifred Cutler’s Athena Institute team warns again that screening X-ray mammography on well women is dangerous , inflicts terror, it does not reduce but may worsen the occurrence of invasive breast cancer. The Berkeley Institute’s Dr Venugopalan under profs Mina Bissell and Daniel Fletcher show that simply gentle massage helps – Compressing Breast Cancer Cells Can Stop Out-of-Control Growth Shelley Hwang ea show that in California simple lumpectomy for early breast cancer reduced deaths (up to 2009) by 28% compared to mastectomy. Belinski & Boyages at the Westmead Centre in Australia show again that common very low vitamin D levels more than double the risk of breast cancer let alone colon and all other cancers. A Harvard team (Liu ea) has just shown that the carnage of legalized poisoning (smoking – lungcancer, vascular; alcohol -liver disease, violence; adulteration with refined sugar/fructose – diabetes, vascular disease, cancer) aside, breast cancer far outstrips the other common cancers (colon, prostate cancer) in preventible life years lost. Willaims ea show again the major benefit of metformin against lethal breast cancer. Amadou ea in France confirm again the strong link between abdominal obesity and breast cancer from childhood throughout life. This again highlights the criminal stupidity of delaying metformin use till obesity let alone infertility or diabetes are established. Metformin can safely be introduced at any stage of life provided it is started at very low dose eg below 250mg/day and cautiously titrated to the maximum well-tolerated dose to avoid nausea and diarrhoea- and temporarily halved or stopped in case of intercurrent gastrointestinal upset. . Grani et al from Rome, Italy and many others remind us that both thyroid and breast malfunction are common by middle age and need to be sought and managed together. We know that in most aging populations, deleterious deficiency of especially magnesium, iodine, selenium, sulphur, and vits B, C, D and K , and melatonin and sex hormones is very common along with crippling multitoxic carcinogenic overload. So it is logical to use multisupplements, and massage anti- inflammatory anti-cancer antioxidant chelating antiestrogenic deep – penetrating iodine, coconut oil and DMSO – into the breasts as multidisease prevention and part of treatment. Oz ea in Turkey show that DMSO is more effective against breast cancer than thalidomide. But more importantly, DMSO enhances transport of any anticancer agents into cancer cells. Already in 2008 Frederick ea showed that Lugol’s Iodine is an important antiestrogen adjuvant against breast cancer. Hence we advise the harmless combination of natural multisystem micronutrients- especially fish oil, coconut oil, DMSO, vitamin C, D, K, melatonin, metformin, selenium, Lugol’s iodine and appropriate progesterone/ testosterone/ DHEA – as nutrient supplements against all chronic aging diseases especially in women at risk of breast cancer. . At Univ Newcastle on Tyne, Dr Dorota Overbeck-Zubrzycka’s landmark PhD thesis just published on FOXP3 regulates metastatic spread of breast cancer via control of expression of CXCR4 chemokine receptor promises new gene therapy in future. and her parallel study with Harvey, A. Griffiths & C. Griffith, Randomised control trial of Breast Tactile Imaging as an assessment tool for diagnosis of breast lumps in 2009/10 is now being published in full in a leading UK journal, validating this ( Sure Touch) bedside and outpatient clinic procedure as an established no-risk screening procedure, objective breast mapping record for anxious women as shown in USA, Indian and Chinese studies. Thus increasingly Authorities are accepting that screening X-ray mammography harms far outweigh trivial if any improvement in survival. But screening – by eg regular clinical exam and mechanical tactile mapping – for early signs of breast degeneration allows gentle safe self – treatment of all multisystem diseases that reverses both the breast degeneration and multisystem risk factors.
Thus they advise against screening people with an expected lifespan of below about 10 years. But who would undergo such bothersome risky screening even over 10 years for a proposed benefit (in death risk reduction) of 0.1% a decade ? They found the reasons against routine screening of those not at high risk ( ie no suspicious personal symptoms or familial history) are as usual those of the ensuing anxiety, the procedures – radiation and colonoscopy and biopsies – and overdiagnosis. The worst is of course the cumulative risk of breast irradiation, and perforation death from colonoscopy: “For cancer screening, about one in 10 patients who are screened (with xray mammography , or with fecal occult blood testing) will have a false positive result, leading to recall worry and likely biopsy/ colonoscopy. Serious complications (such as perforation, major bleeding, and death) occur in 3.1 colonoscopies per 1000 screened. One in 100 routinely mammography-screened women will be biopsied, and one in 1000 will be subject to overdiagnosis (that is, diagnosed with a breast cancer that was unlikely to have been clinically evident during their lifetime) and possibly unnecessary treatment.”
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