THOUSANDS of lives are saved by breast cancer screening
programmes, leading epidemiologists told Peter Gøtzsche and Ole
Olsen of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen examined eight
surveys of the effectiveness of screening programmes, which
followed half a million women in Canada, Scotland, Sweden and
the US. The surveys compared the death rates from breast cancer
for women who had regular X-rays with those who did not.
Gøtzsche and Olsen discarded six of the studies as being
unsound. From the two that remainedone in Canada and one in the
Swedish city of Malmöthey concluded that screening had no effect
( In the six studies they dismissed, Gøtzsche and Olsen found
the ages of the screened populations were slightly different
from the ages of the controls. They say ... To continue reading
this article, subscribe to receive access to all of
newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.