Experts yesterday defended breast screening programmes – and suggested improvements – at a major European conference.
Breast screening has faced criticism from some medical researchers recently – but a major analysis from the Netherlands finds it linked to a big cut in deaths from the disease.
The Dutch researchers also reported that "side-effects", such as false diagnoses, and costs have been "reasonable".
They set out their findings at the European Breast Cancer Conference in Vienna, Austria.
The programme has been in place for 20 years. The researchers say it may have contributed to a 31 per cent reduction in deaths from the disease.
The study showed that a woman who was 50 in 1990 and had ten screenings faced a six per cent chance of facing a false alarm at least once.
Jacques Fracheboud, of the Erasmus University Medical Centre, said: “We found there was a significant change in the annual increase in breast cancer deaths: before the screening programme began, deaths were increasing by 0.3 per cent a year, but afterwards there was an annual decrease of 1.7 per cent.
"This change also coincided with a significant decrease in the rates of breast cancers that were at an advanced stage when first detected.”
He added: "These results provide convincing evidence that the programme contributed to the breast cancer mortality decrease that has been observed in the last 20 years in The Netherlands, and that harms such as the false-positive rates, the interval cancer rate – cancers that are diagnosed in the interval between screenings – and the proportion of over-diagnosed breast cancers were quite limited.
"Our study also shows that the programme is of a high quality and is continually improving."
Another researcher from the same university, Mrs Rianne de Gelder, told the conference of estimates that screening and improved treatment had played an equal part in cutting death rates.
Her conclusions came from a microsimulation computer model.
Meanwhile fellow researchers from Erasmus have suggested adding MRI scans to screening for women who carry known breast cancer genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2.
An eight year study in the Netherlands has founded that adding MRI to routine screening trebles the costs of the programme – while achieving a four percentage point reduction in deaths.
Researcher Dr Sepideh Saadatmand said MRI might prove more effective if used for screening known to be at high cancer risk.
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