Mammograms Can Over-Diagnose Breast Cancer

Mammograms have been considered life-saving but a new research challenges this notion as it claim that it may lead to over-diagnosis and put a woman through harmful treatment.

According to US News & World Report, the new study suggests that mammography reduces death rate by just about 10 percent and can over-diagnose small tumors which may not cause trouble but can lead physicians to put a woman through harmful treatment.

For the study, researchers tracked 16 million US women aged over 40 since 2000 for a decade. Around 53,207 were diagnosed with breast cancer at the outset. The analysis showed that mammograms increase diagnosis of smaller tumors but did not change death rate.

"When analyzed at the county level, the clearest result of mammography screening is the diagnosis of additional small cancers. Furthermore, there is no concomitant decline in the detection of larger cancers, which might explain the absence of any significant difference in the overall rate of death from the disease," researchers wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

US Preventive Services Task Force recently changed its recommendations for mammography. When earlier women over 40 years were asked to get mammograms every one to two years, the task force recently recommended that women over 50 years get mammograms every two years.