Mammography Can Turn Healthy Women into Cancer Patients

I’ve taken a strong, and in some cases controversial position on mammography, and I’m particularly leery of the newer 3D tomosynthesis mammography, which is touted as being so much better but in reality may simply compound the same problems associated with regular mammography, as it increases the amount of harmful (and cancer-causing) ionizing radiation you’re exposed to.

Dr. Northrup agrees, calling 3D tomosynthesis “a better mouse trap.”

“I keep going back to the work of Gilbert Welch from Dartmouth. I believe it is the most important paper to come out about breast cancer almost in my entire career,” she says. “Gil wrote a book called 'Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here’s Why.' That was in 2004. Now he comes out with a paper that has everyone riled up. It’s called 'The Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast Cancer incidents'1[published in the prestigious medical journal New England Journal of Medicine]. He says: 'With the assumption of a constant underlying disease burden, only eight of the 122 additional early-stage cancers diagnosed were expected to progress to advanced disease.

After excluding the transient excess incidence associated with hormone-replacement therapy and adjusting for trends in the incidence of breast cancer among women younger than 40, we estimated that breast cancer was overdiagnosed (i.e., tumors were detected on screening that would never have led to clinical symptoms) in 1.3 million U.S. women in the past 30 years. We estimated that in 2008, breast cancer was overdiagnosed in more than 70,000 women; this accounted for 31 percent of all breast cancers diagnosed.'”

So in 30-year’s time, an estimated 1.3 million women were diagnosed with what amounts to “ductal carcinoma in situ,” also known as stage zero cancer—or cancer you may die with but not from. It’s essentially harmless...

“[Gilbert Welch] pointed to a study [from] way back, of women who died in car accidents in their 40s. They sectioned their breast tissues and found that 40 percent of them – this is normal healthy women dying in car accidents – had evidence of ductal carcinoma in situ that was never going to go anywhere. This is the big dilemma,” Dr. Northrup says.