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Aunt Minnie (8/27) reports, “Women who receive false-positive mammograms are five times more likely to experience long-term unpleasant psychosocial consequences than women with negative exams,” according to research published Aug. 26 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. Swedish researchers “found that the use of early recall...can result in negative emotional consequences that may persist for up to 12 months after the initial false-positive mammogram.” The study’s “authors acknowledged that the consequences of emotional distress should be balanced against the lifesaving value of breast screening.”
HealthDay (8/27, Preidt) reports that the study, which included “nearly 400 such cases found that 88 percent of the women said they felt a sense of dejection, such as being uneasy, sad or unable to cope; 83 percent reported anxiety; 67 percent said they had behavioral changes, such as trouble dealing with spare time or work; and 53 percent suffered sleeping problems.”
ABC World News (8/20, story 5, 0:25, Muir) reported that research suggests “that aggressive treatment for what some doctors say is the earliest stage of” breast cancer “may not be necessary to save lives.”
The AP (8/21) reports that for the study, published online in JAMA Oncology, investigators “analyzed U.S. government data on more than 100,000 women diagnosed from 1988 to 2011 with DCIS — ductal carcinoma in situ.”
TIME (8/21, Park) reports that “overall a diagnosis of DCIS was associated with a higher risk — 3% — of dying of breast cancer in 20 years compared to women who didn’t have the cancer,” with the risk being “highest for younger women (diagnosed before age 35) and for black women.” However, “when the researchers looked more carefully at the women with DCIS, their rates of breast cancer recurrence and their death rates, they found that those getting surgery and radiation or just surgery did indeed lower their risk of getting a recurrent cancer, but did not reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer.”
On its front page, the Washington Post (8/21, Johnson, Cha) reports that these “findings add to concerns that the ability to detect these lesions through mammograms may be leading to unnecessary mastectomies.”