3 ms·

Mammograms are a total waste of your time and money

• digikata 13y ago
  In the source article in the New England Journal of Medicine[1] to this summary article there this statement, "After 25 years of follow-up, it found that 106 of 484 screen-detected cancers (21.9%) were overdiagnosed." I don't understand how the recommendation ends up being, "don't bother with mammography," instead of something like, the protocol after a mammography returns a result needs to be adjusted. Prostate cancer seems to get into the exact same bind. Blinding yourself to additional information because we don't know how to act correctly on the information seems like a non-solution. I know the flip-side argument might be that the test isn't uncovering relevant information. As long as what the test is detecting can be further filtered, why isn't that filtering the focus? e.g. why wouldn't there be some sort of protocol step of longer wait-and-see intervals with added monitoring to see if it would cut out the overdiagnosis after an initial detection event. [1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1401875#t=article http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1401875#t=article