Mammogram screening does not cut risk of breast cancer death

Friday Oct 23, 2009 (foodconsumer.org) -- The American Cancer Society would be proud to tell you that the survival rate of patients with breast cancer has drastically increased since the introduction of mammogram screening. But experts say that the screening method leads to detection and treatment of early stage or indolent tumors, but no decline in cancer mortality.

The survival rate is equal to the ratio of the number of survivors to the total number of breast cancer cases in the first five years after diagnosis. The total number of breast cancer cases include the number of non-life-threatening tumor or cancer and the number of aggressive or later stage, life-threatening cancer. When more non-life-threatening tumors are detected while the total of deaths remains the same, the survival rate looks decreased. But that does not reduce the risk of death from breast cancer!

Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, professor of surgery and radiology, director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center and colleagues published an article in the journal of the American Medical Association to voice their concern about the use of the current mammogram screening for the detection of breast cancer.

Dr. Esserman and colleagues said the method results in increased detection of early stage or non-life-threatening tumors, but the method per se does not reduce the risk of deaths in patients with aggressive breast cancer.

In other words, you can find the disease early, but if it is a late-stage cancer, your odds of dying from the disease remains the same. The slogan used in the medical circle is that early detection leads to early treatment and early treatment in turn leads to reduced risk of death. The fact is, early treatment does not reduce the risk of death from the aggressive tumors.

"We need to focus on developing new tools to identify men and women at risk for the most aggressive cancers, to identify at the time of diagnosis those who have indolent or ‘idle’ tumors that are not life-threatening," Dr. Esserman said.

"If we can identify groups of patients that don’t need much treatment, or don’t need to be screened, wouldn’t that be great? Screening is by no means perfect. We should want to make it better. For both breast and prostate cancer we need to invest in changing our focus from the cancers that won’t kill people to the ones that do."

Breast cancer is diagnosed each year in the United States in more than 180,000 women and kills about 50,000. The disease is largely preventable by following a healthy lifestyle including a healthy diet, according to Dr. Colin T. Campbell, a distinguished nutrition scholar at Cornell University.

October is the month in which women are encouraged to do something, like wear pink or even think pink to raise awareness to the disease. But most campaign organizations are more interested in urging women to undergo regular mammogram screening than encouraging them to take good care of themselves by following a healthy lifestyle. The promotion works! According to a UCSF press release , more than 70 percent of women aged 40 in the U.S. have undergone mammogram screening.

Many things that can be done to reduce the risk of breast cancer including delaying puberty, eating less meat/dairy products and more plant-based foods, avoiding working overnight, having a baby early, avoiding drinking alcohol and smoking, getting lots of sunshine and exercising in moderation regularly and maintaining a good state of mind among others.

By David Liu