4000 breast cancer patients overdiagnosed in UK

Breast cancer screening leads to thousands of women undergoing unnecessary treatment despite saving lives, according to an independent review here Tuesday. The official study found that as many as 4,000 women in Britain receive therapy for non-life threatening forms of the disease every year because of overdiagnosis. But it revealed that about 1,300 lives are saved by mammography. The state-funded the National Health Service Breast Cancer Screening Programme was launched in the UK in 1988 and invites all women aged between 50 and 70 to screening every three years. There has been an ongoing debate about the benefits and harms of screening for the past 10 years, prompting the UK Government and charity Cancer Research UK to last year launch a review of the controversial programme. An independent panel led by University College London's Professor Sir Michael Marmot was tasked with analysing data from screening trials from a number of countries over recent decades. Its report, published in The Lancet medical Journal, concludes that screening reduces breast cancer mortality but that some overdiagnosis occurs. It found that for every life saved, three women were overdiagnosed. The panel said, "Since the estimates provided are from studies with many limitations and whose relevance to present-day screening programmes can be questioned, they have substantial uncertainty and should be regarded only as an approximate guide. "If these figures are used directly, for every 10,000 UK women aged 50 years invited to screening for the next 20 years, 43 deaths from breast cancer would be prevented and 129 cases of breast cancer, invasive and non-invasive, would be overdiagnosed; that is one breast cancer death prevented for about every three overdiagnosed cases identified and treated. "Of the roughly 307,000 women aged 50--52 years who are invited to begin screening every year, just over 1 percent would have an overdiagnosed cancer in the next 20 years."