New research suggests breast cancer screening programs for women over 70 does not result in a decrease in cancer cases.
These women could be unnecessarily exposed to certain side effects of the screenings, an ECCO-the European CanCer Organisation news release reported.
"For a screening [program] to be effective, one would expect that the incidence of early stage breast cancer would increase while the incidence of advanced stage cancer would decrease because any cancer would have been detected at an earlier stage," Doctor Gerrit-Jan Liefers (MD, PhD), a surgical oncologist and head of the geriatric oncology research group at Leiden University Medical Centre said in the news release. "However, when we investigated the effect of extending the screening [program] in The Netherlands from age 69 to 75, we found that it had not led to a decrease in the rate of advanced breast cancers detected, while the numbers of early stage [tumors] strongly increased. This implies that the effect of screening in elderly women is limited and leads to a large proportion of over-diagnosis."
In 1998 the Netherlands extended the breast screening program to women up to the age of 75; they found the number of early stage cancers significantly increased while the rates of late-stage cancer did not. Small early-stage tumors in women of this age are considered low risk.
"In upcoming decades, an increasing proportion of breast cancer patients will be elderly and, therefore, the additional costs of treating over-diagnosed tumors could result in a tremendous increase in health expenditure, while no actual health benefits are being obtained. Since breast cancer treatment in older patients is mostly not evidence-based due to poor inclusion of older patients in clinical trials, we propose that studies investigating breast cancer treatment are much more important than breast cancer screening in this population and should be prioritized," Liefers said.
