Breast screening plays a major role in saving lives, reducing mortality by more than a third, according to the findings of a major study today.
Researchers said their findings showed how mammography continues to be key to tackling the disease in spite of improved diagnosis and treatment – calling for services limited by COVID to be fully restored.
Their findings suggest that for every thousand women who attends screening nine are spared death from breast cancer before the age of 79, according to the report in the British Journal of Cancer.
Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, studied more than 37,000 women for the research.
Researcher Professor Stephen Duffy said: “The NHS Breast Screening Programme is doing its job in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. Our results indicate that the benefit persists for three to four years in women aged under 65, so slippage of the three-year interval would be unsafe for these women.
“In the current COVID crisis, efforts to reinstate the breast screening programme should continue apace. If difficult decisions about delivery of the programme have to be made in the future, it may be appropriate to consider different intervals between screens for different age groups.”
A case-control study to evaluate the impact of the breast screening programme on mortality in England. Br J Cancer 23 November 2020
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