Breast screening risks may outweigh benefits
A review into NHS breast screening has been set up to investigate whether women are being “misinformed” and not made aware of the risks.
Researchers in Denmark last month claimed that the harms of breast screening may outweigh the benefits, and that screening information should be more balanced.
Professor Mike Richards, national cancer director at the Department of Health, has set up an independent review to look into the controversial claims.
The NHS promotes the message that ‘screening saves lives’. Breast screening is routinely offered to women aged 50 to 70 every three years, and it is gradually being extended to women aged 47 to 73.
However the Danish research has led to a debate among academics in the UK, with some professors saying that the NHS screening programme wrongly identifies cancers that might never harm women, leading to drastic treatment – surgery, drugs or radiation – that they may not need.
NHS ‘exaggerates benefits’ of screening
In an open letter to Sir Mike, published in the British Medical Journal, Professor Susan Bewley, consultant obstetrician at King’s College, London wrote that she agreed with the Danish research.
She wrote that she found the NHS leaflets “exaggerated benefits and did not spell out the risks”.
“The distress of over-diagnosis and decision-making when finding lesions that might (or might not) be cancer that might (or might not) require mutilating surgery is increasingly being exposed,” she wrote, adding that “the oft-repeated statement that ‘1,400 lives a year are saved’ [by screening] has not been subjected to proper scrutiny. Even cancer charities use lower estimates.”
Sir Mike said that he takes the current controversy seriously, and will present the review findings to experts from both sides of the argument, as well as to ministers in the Department of Health if necessary.
A Department of Health spokesman said that NHS advice had not changed and urged all women to go for breast screening when invited.