Any practitioner who wants to give women an honest assessment of the research supporting early breast cancer detection should tell them that

* mammography causes harm as well as good. 1

* mammography increases the odds of being diagnosed with and treated for a type of breast cancer that would never have become symptomatic or life threatening. 2

* there is uncertainty as to whether mammography saves lives. 2

* women given mammograms have a higher rate of mastectomy and lumpectomy than women not given mammograms. 2

* breast self-examination has not been shown to reduce the rate of breast cancer deaths, but it does increase the rate of unnecessary biopsies. 3

* no clinical trial has compared women solely given clinical breast examination with women not given clinical breast examination; therefore, it's unknown whether this early-detection method saves lives or leads to less-drastic treatment.

As for the suggestion that every woman should undergo a risk assessment, consider this oft-quoted statistic: 70% of the women diagnosed with breast cancer have no identifiable risk factors. 4 If this is true, it indicates that researchers have a long way to go in determining who's at high risk for breast cancer.

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