Cost of Failed Cancer Treatments Hit $90 Billion
March 17, 2010
USA Today
By: Liz Szabo
The cost of cancer treatment is “skyrocketing” — both for individual patients and the nation, a new analysis shows.
From 1990 to 2008, spending on cancer care soared to more than $90 billion from $27 billion. The increase was driven by the rising costs of sophisticated new drugs, robotic surgeries and radiation techniques, as well as the growing number of patients who are eligible to take them, says Peter Bach of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, co-author of an analysis in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Many older, frailer patients — who might not have been considered strong enough to weather traditional surgery — now have the option to have less invasive operations or more tightly focused radiation treatments, the analysis says.
More of these patients also are able to have chemotherapy, both because of new treatments as well as “supportive” drugs to manage chemo’s side effects, such as nausea.
From 1991 to 2002, for example, the proportion of breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy doubled, to about 24%. The cost of care for each patient also doubled, from $6,642 to $12,802, the analysis says.
Those increases are “unsustainable,” says John Seffrin, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Growing numbers of people simply can’t afford to get the care we know they need,” Seffrin says. “We hear about a growing number of people turning down treatment.”
Charities are struggling to keep up with requests for help. In the past, the American Cancer Society could help one in five patients pay for health care bills. Today, the society can help only one in six, says Seffrin, who notes that the poor economy only adds to cancer patients’ hardships.
The social service group CancerCare helped 13% more people in 2009 than the year before and distributed nearly $4.4 million. Both CancerCare and American Cancer Society have set up organizations to help insured people with co-pays.
One in four cancer patients or their families said they used up all or most of their savings to pay for treatment, according to a 2006 survey by USA TODAY, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
A spate of new drugs for advanced colorectal cancer also has helped patients live slightly longer but at great cost, says David Howard of Emory University, author of a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Drugs approved in the past decade extended these patients’ survival in 2005 to about 16 months — an improvement of 7 months — at an additional cost of $37,100 a patient, the study says.
Howard and Bach agree that doctors and drug companies today have no incentive to lower prices.
Cancer specialists can make more money by prescribing more expensive drugs, Bach says. Studies show that doctors who are “generously” reimbursed tend to prescribe more costly therapies.
The use of hormone-suppressing drugs for prostate cancer, for example, fell 14% in just two years after Medicare slashed what it was paying doctors, according to a 2008 study in Cancer.
“Right now, there are no economic incentives to use resources wisely,” Bach says.
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Cancer Treatments Can be Worse Than the Disease
March 16, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Large numbers of men who undergo treatment for testicular cancer suffer serious and long-term side effects or illness, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Oslo and published in the journal BJUI.
In the past, the rate of long-term side effects has not been well known because doctors are only required to report side effects that require medical intervention or threaten the patient’s life.
“Current patients with testicular cancer should be informed about the risk of short-term and particularly long-term side-effects of their highly effective treatment” lead author Sophie D. Fossa said. “It is important to focus on reducing risks through healthy lifestyle choices and consider important issues like preserving future fertility.”
Reviewing 40 studies published between 1990 and 2008, the researchers found that a full 30 percent of patients undergoing cisplatin-based chemotherapy may suffer from damage to their sensory nerves, while 20 percent of testicular cancer survivors suffer from hearing loss or ringing in their ears. The rate of chronic fatigue in survivors is 17 percent, which is twice as high as in the general population. As many as 25 percent of survivors suffer long-term damage to their circulatory systems. Testicular cancer survivors also have 1.8 times the general risk of developing another form of cancer.
“Gastrointestinal side-effects are common during both chemotherapy and radiotherapy and chemotherapy carries added risks like infections and blood clots,” Fossa said. “Long-term problems include secondary cancers, heart problems, and conditions related to lower hormone levels.”
Testicular cancer treatments increase a man’s risk of pulmonary complications, death from heart complications, fertility reduction and dry ejaculation.
The best way to reduce the risk of dangerous side effects, Fossa said, is to maintain an active lifestyle and healthy weight, avoid tobacco, and for doctors to “provide adequate follow-up for patients who could develop life-threatening toxicity.”
Although side effects of cancer treatment can pose serious risks throughout a person’s lifetime, most patients receive only five to 10 years of follow-up care, at most.
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Many Cancer Patients Over Radiated
February 26, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
One of the advantages of natural medicine is that if you make a mistake on your dosage, it’s usually no big deal because natural medicine is inherently safe. But conventional medicine, with all its toxic chemotherapy poisons and irradiation machines, can be fatal even when simple mistakes are made. Numerous patients have already been killed by miscalibrated chemotherapy pumps that drip poison in to the bodies of patients. And now there’s news from Springfield Missouri where an actively-used brain cancer irradiation machine has been miscalibrated since 2004.
Oops. Gee, didn’t anyone wonder why the burn marks were so severe and patients were losing brain function so rapidly?
Oh, wait. I forgot: Nobody noticed because losing cognitive function is a “normal” side effect of conventional cancer treatments. Harming patients in the cancer industry is now so routine that nobody even notices it anymore!
Nobody bothered to check the machine
The facts of this case are a bit frightening because this could happen anywhere, in any hospital: For the last five years, patients undergoing brain irradiation treatments have been over-exposed to very high levels of radiation. The radiation machine at the CoxHealth hospital in Springfield, Missouri was apparently never calibrated correctly. The incompetent technicians who set up the machine (who probably lost their own brain function as a result of being around so many miscalibrated radiation machines) apparently never bothered to configure it correctly. They just used the default setting the machine came with, which happened to be the “Fry my brain” setting.
Now here’s the really scary part: The massive radiation overdose problem was only discovered when the hospital trained a new physician on the machine. They were apparently going over all the settings and functions of the machine when the new doctor asked something like, “Hey, why is this dosage knob turned all the way up to ‘Hiroshima’?”
Hospital administrators scratched their heads (after which clumps of hair fell out) and then began to realize something was wrong. “This might explain all the severe radiation burns on patients skulls…”
Oops.
So what, exactly, do you do in a case like this? Do you call all the brain cancer patients who suffered radiation burns and a loss of cognitive function and say, “Um, we’re really sorry that we fried your brain because we were too stupid to configure the radiation machine correctly…”
Or do you just hope no one notices because cancer patients are too frightened to know the difference between “treatment” and a radiological assault?
I have a solution to this problem
This accidental irradiation overdose issue is a huge problem all across the country. Radiation machines are often miscalibrated, and there’s virtually no oversight by anyone. Hospitals can openly operate miscalibrated machines for years on end without anyone doing a single thing to stop them.
But I have a simple, highly-effective solution to this problem: Just require cancer doctors to irradiate their own brains using the machines before treating patients. If such a rule were enforced, I’ll bet you that all of a sudden those machines would be correctly calibrated.
Naturopathic physicians, by the way, aren’t afraid to take the same medicine they’re about to prescribe to patients. You need these anti-viral herbs? I’ll take some too just to show you how safe they are, see? No big deal.
But conventional cancer doctors would never inject themselves with chemotherapy or stick their heads under an operating radiotherapy machine. You know why? Because those treatments are dangerous! That’s why they’re reserved solely for patients. Only the patients get poisoned and irradiated.
Why do you think radiology technicians flee the room before they fire up their machines on patients? They flee the room because they don’t want to be anywhere near that radiation!
Cancer doctors aren’t very bright about curing cancer, but they are smart enough to figure out that radiation = cancer. Which makes it all the more hilarious that they use radiation to treat cancer, huh?
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Cancer Can Regrow After Radiation/Chemotherapy
February 24, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
Researchers from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have published findings in the journal Cell that explain how tumor cells can re-seed and spread throughout the body after they have been removed through conventional chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation treatments. Tiny tumor cells that circulate throughout the body often begin to send out seeds to the places where the tumor originated, essentially planting the cancer back into the body.
Joan Massague and her colleagues at the Center are finding that conventional treatments leave behind malignant cells that relocate to other areas of the body to avoid being destroyed. Eventually they return as stronger and more aggressive tumors, having gathered back the worst leftover cells from the previous cancer. The result is a second cancer that is worse than the first.
Chemicals present in the immune system also appear to signal tumor cells in circulation to return to their source. Following conventional treatment, the immune system actually works against the body by drawing the vagrant cancer cells back to where they originally seeded, kick starting a relapse.
Medical professionals typically attribute recurrences of cancer following conventional treatment to a few remaining cells that survived treatment and remained at the source. However this study illustrates definitively that lingering cells hide throughout the body and later return to self seed back where they originally started.
What these findings illustrate is that conventional cancer treatments are not effective at eradicating cancer from the body. The targeting of a specific area with surgery, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy cannot successfully remove the cancer from the body because its cells will find another place to live temporarily, only to return even stronger the next time.
Biopsies cause cancer to spread
A conventional biopsy is usually recommended as the best way to identify the presence of cancer, both before and after treatments. Needle biopsies involve taking tissue samples at various places in order to identify the presence of cancer cells. Official diagnosis of cancer cannot take place without a biopsy, resulting in the pressuring of patients to get one if they suspect a tumor.
Many doctors will insist that a person needs a biopsy, but the threat of spreading cancer far outweighs any perceived benefits. Those who receive biopsies will most likely experience unnecessary cancer spread and, following conventional treatment, will probably experience cancer reseeding. Cancer is known to develop at the puncture sites of biopsies.
Chemotherapy leads to reseeding
Chemotherapy treatments involve targeting cancer cells that are rapidly dividing and spreading with harsh chemicals designed to kill them. While treatment may kill the primary tumor, it fails to eradicate the cells that divide more slowly, resulting in a continued replication of cancer cells following treatment.
Many who believe they are in remission following their chemotherapy treatments later discover that their cancer has returned. Not only do they undergo the horrors of the treatment which leaves their body and health in shambles, but they often end up with a more severe version of their original cancer.
Conventional therapies are a failure
Conventional medicine is at a loss for how to deal with the problem of reseeding. Within their paradigm, chemotherapy, radiation, drugs, and surgery are the only options for treating someone with cancer. Now that these are proving to be largely ineffective, scientists are searching for yet another new drug to combat the tendency of cancers to re-seed in order to continue promoting these accepted forms of cancer treatment. They are even investigating the possibility of developing vaccines that will allegedly use the body’s immune system to stop vagrant cancer cells.
The problem with drugs, surgery, and radiation is that they will never be able to systematically rid the body of the problem because they are only capable of targeting a confined area. These methods are also wrought with negative side effects so severe that many people end up dying simply from the treatment.
Conventional treatment is also extremely expensive, heavily burdening an already overwhelmed health care system. It is simply assumed that there are no alternative methods by which cancer can be treated, let alone prevented.
Many recently published studies have found that pomegranates, mangoes, and other natural foods contain valuable phytonutrients that effectively prevent and stop malignant cancer cells while preserving good cells. These nutrients holistically rid the body of harmful cells, targeting them wherever they hide in the body and eliminating them.
Conventional medicine would do best to begin focusing heavily on the compounds found in nature that are designed to deter cancer without inflicting negative side effects as an alternative to the mainstream methods that are only making the problem worse. Whether in aloe vera, peach pits, raw almonds, or the many fruits and vegetables found around the world, anti-cancer nutrients are everywhere and modern medicine is only beginning to recognize them. They may not result in the next big blockbuster drug but they work and they are inexpensive. Perhaps this is the reason they are generally marginalized and looked down upon by the cancer industry.
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Traditional Chinese Medicine Coming to the Forefront
February5, 2010
Straight.com
By Charlie Smith
Vancouver library worker Todd Wong knows better than most that life occasionally delivers a rude surprise. In 1989, Wong came back from a trip to New York feeling rundown. At first, his doctor diagnosed a recurrent viral flu. Only after visiting an oncologist did Wong, then 29 years old, learn that he had a germ-cell tumour related to testicular cancer. It required emergency chemotherapy to deal with a growth in his chest the size of a large grapefruit.
“The first night I’m in the hospital, the doctor tells my parents, ‘There is a 60-percent chance your son will survive because we only discovered this very, very late,’ ” Wong told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “I was 29 years old, really active, and the doctors never suspected anything.”
Wong, a fifth-generation Chinese Canadian, was visited regularly by his mother, who wanted to give her son therapeutic touching to help him heal. She asked about doing energy work known as Reiki, because this is what she had practised at home. “The doctor told her, ‘If you want to do that, you can take your son out of the hospital,’ ” Wong recalled.
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His mother kept coming to the hospital every night to surreptitiously practise Reiki on her son, and Wong’s grandmother brought affirmations from a book by Louise Hay called You Can Heal Your Life. Later, he called a psychology instructor at Capilano College (now Capilano University) to learn how to practise visualization. When he was well enough to attend Simon Fraser University, every course he took had a focus on illness and health. “I did directed studies on the relationship between stress and illness,” Wong said. “I learned that psychoneuroimmunology [study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems] was only coined as a term in 1980.”
Two decades after Wong’s recovery, he sees much greater cooperation taking place between allopathic and complementary health practitioners. The B.C. Cancer Agency is backing a complementary medicine education and outcomes program, which is examining how to safely combine complementary approaches with traditional cancer treatments. The team, led by principal researcher and UBC nursing professor Lynda Balneaves, is exploring the most effective ways to support cancer patients in making decisions in this area. In addition, the researchers hope to enhance health professionals’ understanding of this area.
Meanwhile, the U.S.–based National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has been conducting scientific research on complementary and alternative healing practices for 10 years. It also trains researchers in this area and disseminates information to allopathic practitioners. For example, it has noted that acupuncture has demonstrable therapeutic benefits for low back pain, and that tai chi may benefit older adults with osteoarthritis in the knee.
During his recovery, Wong visited naturopath and acupuncturist Larry Chan, one of the founders of Integrative Healing Arts on Vancouver’s West Side, who helped him think “outside the box” about the origins of illness. Wong is convinced that health is about finding balance and looking at the body system in a holistic framework rather than focusing exclusively on germs or viruses. Integrative is one of several facilities—including the Broadway Wellness Centre, Cross Roads Clinics, and Finlandia Natural Pharmacy and Health Centre—that offer an interdisciplinary and complementary approach to health care.
Chan’s niece, Karen Lam, started working at Integrative as a receptionist in 1986. Some family members were horrified when she began studying traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the early 1990s. They demanded to know if Lam, a fifth-generation Vancouverite, was going to spend the rest of her life working in a herbal-medicine shop in Chinatown. “It’s only been in the last three years that I’ve shaken off that self-imposed doubt about what I do in the eyes of the medical profession,” she said during an interview in her office.
She describes acupuncture as “attuning the body to healing itself”, and said it shouldn’t be described as a “cure”. In addition to acupuncture, TCM also focuses on a proper diet, lifestyle, and herbal remedies to enhance the body’s capacity to heal itself. “I assess somebody by their posture, their demeanour, their expression, the light in their eyes, the colour of their skin, their hair—just their overall vitality,” Lam said, adding that she uses TCM in the areas of conception, fertility, and stress.
There’s no shortage of skeptics who are quick to pounce on alternative treatments. In their 2008 book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, complementary-health critics Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst reported that acupuncture burst into western consciousness after New York Times reporter James Reston received the treatment as an anesthetic in China in 1971. Reston later wrote a laudatory article about it in his newspaper. “The American physicians who visited China in the early 1970s were not accustomed to deception or political manipulation, so it took a couple of years before their naive zeal for acupuncture turned to doubt,” Singh and Ernst wrote. “Eventually, by the mid-1970s, it had become clear to many of them that the use of acupuncture as a surgical anesthetic in China had to be treated with skepticism.”
Wong, however, attributed his cancer recovery, in part, to his mother’s reliance on TCM. “We did it all on our own because there were no support programs back then,” he noted.
Green Tea Halts Growth of Prostate Cancer Tumors
February 5, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
An extract made from one of the main antioxidants found in green tea may be able to slow the progression of prostate cancer, according to a study conducted by researchers from Louisiana state University and published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Researchers gave 26 prostate cancer patients between the ages of 41 and 68’s four capsules of day of Polyphenon E, an extract of epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) made by Polyphenon Pharma. EGCG is a powerful antioxidant to which many of the health benefits of green tea have been attributed. The dosage given to the participants in the study was equivalent to that acquired from drinking 12 cups of green tea per day.
After 12 weeks, the researchers found that levels of the prostate cancer markers Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and prostate specific antigen (PSA) had fallen by an average of 18.9 percent, 9.9 percent and 10.4 percent, respectively, indicating a slowed progression of the disease.
PSA is a marker of inflammation, and indicates disease severity in prostate cancer patients. HGF and VEGF are both produced by prostate tumors as they spread to other parts of the body.
In some patients, HGF and VEGF levels fell as much as 30 percent upon treatment with the EGCG extract.
The researchers were cautiously optimistic about the study findings.
“It’s still in an early stage,” researcher Jim Cardelli said. “Green tea can keep cancer from growing very fast, but it may not be able to shrink tumors. But it can be a good addition to traditional therapies, like chemo (chemotherapy) or radiation.”
Researchers do not know whether the same effects could be seen in other cancers, but the antioxidants in green tea have previously been linked to a reduced risk of a variety of cancers, skin and autoimmune conditions, cardiovascular disease and inflammation.
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Herbal Medicine Backlash
February 3, 2010
The Guardian
By Bibi van der Zee
Tomorrow, an army of medical herbalists will be demonstrating outside the House of Commons. “What are they going to do,” wonders sceptic Adam Rutherford, an editor at the science journal Nature, “wave strands of lavender at MPs?” But Michael McIntyre, chair of the European Herbal and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association (EHTPA), has called for the demonstration because, quite frankly, he has had enough.
For several decades, it’s true, the field of complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs, as they are often known) has boomed, with acupuncturists, osteopaths and homeopaths springing up on every corner. Lately, however, a fierce backlash has been brewing. Scientists such as Professor Edzard Ernst (who puts complementary medicine’s claims through clinical trials), and writers such as the Guardian’s own Ben Goldacre, have turned a long-needed microscope on to CAMs and accused them of being at best harmless, and at worst fraudulent and toxic. Herbal medicine was described by Rose Shapiro, in her book Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All, as mostly “ineffective . . . if it worked and was safe it wouldn’t need to be alternative . . . Herbal medicine should be subject to the same evidence-based regulation as are orthodox pharmaceuticals.”
These days, though, the majority of herbal practitioners are crying out for regulation, but despite promising to implement this for 20 years now, the government is still dragging its heels. Meanwhile, discredited herbalists are able to continue practicing, giving the field a bad name. And next year, when European legislation comes in which will stop unregulated practitioners from accessing many key herbal medicines, UK herbalists may well find themselves snookered.
But it has not all been bad news, as some new clinical trials have proved the efficacy of various herbal treatments. A review of studies of hawthorn (authored by Ernst) concluded that it is not only useful as a treatment for chronic heart failure, but also carries few of the risks associated with some conventional medicines. Horse chestnut, in another study by Ernst, has been shown to be useful for treating chronic venous insufficiency (when leg veins are not strong enough to pump blood back up to the heart), again with fewer side effects than conventional equivalents. And some of the studies on St John’s wort have shown that it can improve symptoms of depression.
Garlic, another common herbal treatment, is regularly shown to reduce blood cholesterol, while black cohosh, an ancient Native American treatment, has had some success in clinical trials of its efficacy in treating menopausal symptoms. Studies of green tea,meanwhile, have shown that it can help inhibit tumour growth.
But this is not enough for the sceptics. “Yes, a few herbal treatments may turn out to be medically effective,” says Rutherford. “But for every one that turns out to work, there are hundreds that are just bollocks. It’s not half and half; many of these treatments turn out to be no better than a placebo.”
And yet scientists are increasingly turning back to the natural world in their search for modern medicines.Research is throwing up rich and intriguing results, showing that, among other things, the combination of tomatoes and broccoli is more effective in combatting tumours than either vegetable used alone; that cranberries really are effective at preventing urinary tract infections; that ginger can reduce nausea in the early stages of chemotherapy.
Declan Naughton, professor of biomolecular sciences at Kingston University, was part of a team which last year showed that mixing pomegranate rind with metal salts and vitamin C created an ointment effective at fighting the hospital superbug MRSA. “As time has gone on,” he says, “it has become more and more clear to me that a great number of the drugs we use originate from plants. If you were to sit down and list them, you’d be speaking for a long while, and if you’re looking at developing new drugs, then you should obviously look to nature.”
Could there ever be a meeting of minds between ancient herbal and modern medics? “You do have [herbal practitioners] following practices that are just unacceptable,” says Naughton. “But you also have an increasing number of scientists screening herbs to find new drugs; more and more scientists are turning back to the original sources of medicine, the micro-bacteria, marine organisms and plants from the rainforests.”
“For centuries now we’ve been using these treatments,” says McIntyre, a herbalist himself for 30 years. “It’s profoundly frustrating to have to spend so much time battling to get ourselves regulated when what I’d really like to be doing is be in my practice, treating people.”
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Radiation Therapy Can Harm the Brain – Affecting Memory and Attention
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Radiation therapy for the treatment of brain tumors may lead to cognitive decline later in life, according to a study conducted by researchers from VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and published in The Lancet Neurology.
Scientists have known for some time that radiation therapy can damage healthy brain tissue, but prior research found no immediate negative effects from the treatment. In the new study, researchers conducted brain function tests on 65 patients who had undergone treatment for low-grade glioma 12 years previously.
Low-grade glioma is one of the most common forms of brain tumor. It is non-carcinogenic, and can often be removed with surgery. However, many doctors use radiotherapy following surgery.
The researchers found that a full 53 percent of patients who had been treated with radiation exhibited problems with mental function 12 years after their treatment, compared with only 27 percent of those who had not undergone radiation treatment. Radiotherapy patients were especially likely to have problems with memory and attention.
Because the average patient survives a full decade after being diagnosed with low-grade glioma, the researchers noted that large numbers of patients will survive long enough to suffer the negative cognitive effects of radiotherapy. For this reason, they recommended that doctors avoid using radiation in the treatment of glioma unless absolutely necessary — such as in cases where the tumor returns after surgery, for example.
“It always depends on the patient, but if it is possible to defer radiotherapy, maybe people should,” lead researcher Linda Douw said.
Cancer research scientist Jeremy Rees of the United Kingdom’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery Honorary said that his hospital already avoids radiotherapy for low-grade glioma patients except when the tumor is already progressing or when the patient suffers from uncontrolled epilepsy.
“Surgery is generally a preferred option with chemotherapy or radiotherapy coming into play at a later stage, if the glioma progresses,” he said.
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Continuing The Question of Breast Cancer Screenings
January 20, 2010
Telegraph.co.uk
By Rebecca Smith
Despite assertions that screening saves 1,400 lives a year, there is no evidence the programme has cut deaths, the article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine said.
Controversy over the benefits of breast cancer screening were first raised last year when experts said women were not being told of the potential harms in leaflets given out to encourage attentance.
Women may be wrongly told they have cancer and so undergo unnecessary treatment and screening may detect tumours that would not progress to be harmful and so could also be removed needlessly. The unnecessary treatments may expose women to chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery which itself has harmful effects.
Experts at the Nordic Cochrane Centre has now calculated that 7,000 women in Britain are being wrongly diagnosed with breast cancer as a result of screening.
In 2006 there were 45,400 women and 300 men diagnosed with breast cancer in Britain, according to data held by Cancer Research UK.
Figures from the charity show in the 1970s only five out of 10 patients lived for five years after diagnosis compared with eight out of ten now.
Two authors from the Nordic Cochrane Centre, an independent research centre, evaulated the NHS screening programme’s annual report and said many of its assertions are not backed by the evidence.
Mortality rates for breast cancer began dropping before the screening programme was introduced in 1988 and have dropped just as much in women too young to be called for screening showing that the reduction in deaths is probably due to better treatment and not screening, it said.
Lead author Karsten Juhl Jørgensen said one in five women who have been screened for ten years will have been recalled for some suspect finding on their mammography raising concern they have cancer only to be given the all clear.
Some of those women will have had further testing such as a biopsy taken by inserting a needle into the ‘tumour’ and three per cent will have had surgery.
The article went on to say that women who attend for screening are often more health conscious so their prognosis will be better and screening tends to find cancers that are slow growing and both factors contribute to the idea that women whose cancers are detected via screening have better survival rates.
It said:”Most of the pronounced decline in breast cancer mortality is likely caused by improved treatment, which can explain why it has been similarly large among the young women who have not been invited to screening. Other factors, such as increased ‘breast awareness’, may also have contributed.”
Professor Julietta Patnick, Director of the NHS Cancer Screening Programmes said: “This paper is not based on any new data. The NHS Breast Screening Programme, the independent Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer Screening and numerous independent screening practitioners have all responded previously pointing out the inaccuracies in the author’s selection and use of the statistics on breast screening.
“Numerous independent studies have shown breast cancer screening reduces mortality. A report from the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that there is a 35 per cent reduction in mortality from breast cancer among regularly screened women aged 50 – 69 years old.
“In the UK the independent Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer Screening estimated that for every 400 women screened regularly by the NHS Breast Screening Programme over a 10 year period, one woman fewer will die from breast cancer than would have died without screening, and the current NHS Breast Screening Programme saves an estimated 1,400 lives each year in England.”
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “Cancer remains a high priority for this Government. The Cancer Reform Strategy, published in December 2007 sets out a clear direction for cancer services over the next five years and shows how we will deliver cancer outcomes that are amongst the best in the world.
“We know that, generally, the earlier a cancer is diagnosed the greater the chance it will be treated successfully. During 2007/08, the NHS Breast Screening Programme screened over 1.7 million women and 14,110 cancers were detected.”
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