New study: Breast cancer deaths lower in areas without mammograms

(NaturalNews) A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion. First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn’t hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there’s no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn’t undergo those screening tests. The Danish research team looked at annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions where breast cancer screening programs were offered to the public and compared this to data collected in non-screened regions throughout the rest of the country. To get a broad picture of the trend toward more or less breast cancer mortality, they analyzed breast malignancy rates in the decade before the screening was started and also looked at the ten years after screening was introduced. The results showed that breast cancer deaths declined by 1% in women between the ages of 55 and 74 in the areas where regular mammography was frequently used. However, breast cancer rates went down more — 2% per year — in women of the same age living in non-screened areas. And this trend was the same in younger women, too. For those between the ages of 35 and 54, breast cancer mortality went down by 5% per year in the screened areas but it went down more, 6% per year, in the non-screened areas during the same time frame. The researchers noted that there’s no evidence that the drops in cancer deaths in the women screened for breast cancer had anything to do directly with mammograms, either. “We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening program on breast cancer mortality,” the researchers concluded in their study, which was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) . “The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas and in younger age groups, and are more likely explained by changes in risk factors and improved treatment than by screening mammography.” The BMJ study also noted that for women in the oldest age group (75-84 years), there was virtually no breast cancer mortality difference between those who were in areas where breast screening was pushed on the public and in non-screened areas. As NaturalNews has previously reported, in the U.S. even elderly women who are not expected to live long because they suffer from severe dementia are often regularly subjected to the expense, discomfort and added x-ray exposure of mammography (http://www.naturalnews.com/028095_mammograms_Alzheimers.html). Two members of the same Danish research team that published the BMJ study also published an additional paper in the March edition of the Polish medical journal Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej (Pol Arch Med Wewn) . It directly addressed the balance between the supposed benefits and known harms of cancer screening programs. “By attending screening with mammography some women will avoid dying from breast cancer or receive less aggressive treatment. But many more women will be over-diagnosed, receive needless treatment, have a false-positive result, or live more years as a patient with breast cancer,” they concluded. Moreover, as readers of NaturalNews are aware, studies over the past few years have actually implicated mammograms in causing some breast cancers to develop in the first place. For example, a study published in the Archives of of Internal Medicine in 2008 found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). For more information : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332505 http://www.naturalnews.com/028407_mammograms_radiation.html

Mammograms cause 7,000 women to receive false positives each year in the UK

(NaturalNews) Experts from the Nordic Cochrane Centre (NCC) in the U.K. have estimated that about 7,000 British women are improperly diagnosed for breast cancer each year because of mammography. The group is urging the National Health Service (NHS) to reevaluate its breast cancer screening program, citing a failure of mammography to properly diagnose patients. Controversy over the legitimacy of mammography has been heating up worldwide as increasing numbers of medical professionals, industry watchdogs, consumer advocates, and others are recognizing that mammography is failing to achieve what it was intended to do. Not only does it improperly detect cancer cells, but it often subjects women to needless treatments that end up causing them more harm than good. Official British mammography rhetoric claims that 1,400 deaths are prevented every year from mammography screenings, however there is no evidence to back up this claim. The NCC article, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine explains that many of the claims made by the NHS about its screening program are not backed up by evidence. Take, for instance, the fact that mortality rates from breast cancer were steadily dropping before the screening program was implemented in the late 1980s. Even amongst women too young for screenings, a reduction in breast cancer deaths was taking place, indicating that the screening program had nothing to do with it. On the contrary, mammography screening often misdiagnoses women with cancer, causing them to undergo dangerous treatments like chemotherapy, radiation, and biopsy surgery which end up taking a big toll on their bodies. The screenings themselves also inflict routine doses of toxic radiation that can encourage the growth and spread of malignant cancer cells, defeating the point. Representatives from NHS were quick to defend the screening process, claiming that critics are not properly interpreting data and statistics concerning breast cancer mortality rates. According to them, women who are screened have a 35 percent less chance of dying from breast cancer. It is difficult to pinpoint just how many women get breast cancer from screenings. There are also no statistics on how many women die from chemotherapy and radiation treatments that they did not actually need or for cancers that they would not have gotten would they not have been screened. One thing is for sure; the cancer industry continues to insist that mammography screening is safe and effective at preventing breast cancer deaths, despite evidence that indicates otherwise. Sources for this story include: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7019952/Breast-cancer-screening-benefits-questioned.html