Suggestion of some benefit screening women older than 80:
For octogenarian women and older, regular screening mammography may translate into earlier breast cancer diagnoses and better disease-specific survival.
Related posts:
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- Breast cancer screening: Orac’s take
- False positive cancer screening tests doesn’t resonate in Congress
- "The great majority of women in the United States should not be getting MRI scans for breast cancer screening"
- Prostate cancer screening in men over 75
- Are we finding too much breast cancer?
- Mammography is a "crude tool"
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Five-year breast cancer-specific survival rates were 94% for regular mammography users, 88% for irregular users, and 82% for nonusers (P<0.0001).
Does anyone of these researchers understand lead-time bias? overdiagnosis bias? length bias? 5-year survival numbers ONLY make sense when you start from the same point of origin. If a train crashes in Miami, I take it in NYC and you take it in Washington, then my survival is longer. Yet you wouldn’t say I am better off?
Any screening, regardless of whether or not it saves lives results in improved 5-year survival rates. I bet neuroblastoma screening in Japan – a major fiasco that failed to save a single kid but harmed a few – also increased survival rates by simply increasing the number of diagnosed cases.
How can published researchers continue to ignore lead-time bias? ONLY comparison of numbers of people who died of breast cancer in screened vs not screened group makes sense when evaluating if screening has benefit.
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