(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Can breast cancer disappear on its own?
A new Norwegian report finds some breast cancers detected on mammography may
have gone away if they had not been found and treated.
The study looked at breast cancer rates among 119,472 women age 50 to 64.
Participants had three screening mammograms between 1996 and 2001. Researchers
compared them to a control group of 109,784 women age 50 to 64 in 1992, who did
not have the screening. They tracked the cancers for six years then gave all
participants a final mammogram.
Results show breast cancer rates were 22-percent higher in the group screened
multiple times. 1,909 of every 100,000 women in the multiple-screened group had
breast cancer compared to 1,564 of every 100,000 women in the group screened
only once.
“This raises the possibility that the natural course of some screen-detected
invasive breast cancers is to spontaneously regress,” write the authors.
“Although many clinicians may be skeptical of the idea, the excess incidence
associated with repeated mammography demands that spontaneous regression be
considered carefully.”
Researchers say the results imply that as many as two out of three mammograms
detected lesions that may be pseudo cancers.
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, 2008;168:2311-2316
