Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Breast Cancer Screening: Two Strategies Are Equally Effective

�An organized population-based tit cancer screening program in Norway and an approaching to screening that relies on mD and self-referrals in Vermont are as sensitive for detecting cancer, researchers paper in the July 29 online issuing of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. But the recall charge per unit for unnatural mammograms was lower in Norway.





Breast malignant neoplastic disease screening in the United States is usually initiated in reply to a physician's testimonial (known as "opportunistic screening"), and women are well-advised to have annual showing mammograms. By contrast, white meat cancer screening programs in Norway and in some other European countries regularly send letters to all women in a specific age range inviting them to have a screening mammogram. The Norway computer program aims for women to be screened every 2 years. The differences between the deuce approaches create it relatively difficult to compare their effectiveness, and few studies have aimed to do so previously.





In the current study, Berta Geller, Ed.D., of the University of Vermont in Burlington, Solveig Hofvind, Ph.D., of the Cancer Registry of Norway, and colleagues compared the screening approaches by looking at the percentage of women wHO were recalled for a re-evaluation, the screening detection rate of breast cancer, and the rate of interval cancers in 45,050 women in Vermont and 194,430 women in Norway from 1997 to 2003. Women included in the study were aged 50 to 69 years at the prison term of screening.





The age-adjusted screening detection pace of cancers was interchangeable between the two populations (2.77 per 1,000 woman-years in Vermont versus 2.57 in Norway), all the same, more than three times as many women were recalled in Vermont than in Norway (9.8 percent versus 2.7 percent, severally). The rate of interval cancers was higher in Vermont than in Norway (1.24 per 1,000 woman-years versus 0.86), and 55.9 percent of the separation cancers were 15 mm or littler in Vermont compared with 38.2 percent of the interval cancers in Norway. When all cancers detected during regular screening and between screening mammograms were combined, there were no substantial differences in the prognostic features of invasive cancers detected in the two populations.





The researchers conclude that although to the highest degree of the women in Vermont were screened doubly as oftentimes as the women in Norway, the overall rate of cancer detection was similar. Given the shorter interval betwixt screens, Geller and colleagues were surprised to find a higher interval cancer rate in the Vermont women and hypothesize that "Vermont women and/or their health care providers crataegus laevigata more readily pursue rating of symptoms and clinical findings than their Norwegian counterparts."





"Our results demonstrate that despite its longer screening interval, the organized population-based screening programme in Norway achieved similar outcomes as the timeserving screening in Vermont," the authors write.









Citation: Hofvind S, Vacek PM, Skelly J, Weaver DL, Geller BM. Comparing Screening Mammography for Early Breast Cancer Detection in Vermont and Norway. J Natl Cancer Inst 2008; 100:1082-1091





The Journal of the National Cancer Institute is promulgated by Oxford University Press and is not affiliated with the National Cancer Institute. Visit the Journal online at http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/.





Source: Liz Savage



Journal of the National Cancer Institute




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