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Breast Cancer False Positives Are Possible

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Recently, the New England Journal of Medicine published results of a study indicating that a woman who has an annual mammogram, as medically recommended for some women, has a 50-50 chance that over a 10-year period one of those mammograms will indicate a problem where none exists.

The fact is that women 50 and older who get annual mammograms and women age 40 to 49 who get them at least every couple of years greatly increase their chances of early cancer detection. Mammograms reduce the risk of dying from breast cancer by 26 percent among women between the ages of 50 and 79, the age group that accounts for the vast majority of breast cancer deaths.

Doctors should make it a practice to advise patients before they have a mammogram that a false positive, while not common, is a possibility and an initial positives result may be overturned by further tests. So, it is particularly important that women not be put off by the fear that the procedure might tell them they're sick when they're not. It sure beats having it the other way around.

[Source: New England Journal of Medicine, Chicago Tribune]

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