New Guidelines for Breast-Cancer Screening

A few weeks ago, as I reported here, Gina Kolata at the New York Times reported that the American Cancer Society was planning to scale back their recommendations on routine screening for prostate and breast cancers.

As discussed by the Knight Tracker, she got a lot of grief for this story, and the next day the Times published a more reserved follow-up story by Tara Parker-Pope, also discussed by the Tracker. In fact, her primary source at the society, Dr. Otis Brawley, later wrote a letter to the editor denying any intention to change the guidelines (although he is on record cautioning about overscreening).

This isn't the first time that a page-one story by Kolata has gotten into trouble. Her 1998 story on cancer drugs was cited as a cautionary tale in my medical-writing course at NYU. That story quoted James Watson as saying (privately, at a banquet) that Judah Folkman was "going to cure cancer in two years" with his amniogenesis inhibitors. Watson later denied saying any such thing.

Nonetheless, Kolata accurately conveyed a painful dilemma of cancer screening: more isn't necessarily better. Not for all cancers, and not for all patients.

The U.S Preventive Services Task Force has now issued revised recommendations for breast-cancer screening for patients who have no indications of high risk. In part, they moved the earliest age for mammography back up from 40 to 50, at which point they recommend a scan every two years rather than every year.

These recommendations were based not primarily on financial costs, but on health risks to patients:

"The harms resulting from screening for breast cancer include psychological harms, unnecessary imaging tests and biopsies in women without cancer, and inconvenience due to false-positive screening results. Furthermore, one must also consider the harms associated with treatment of cancer that would not become clinically apparent during a woman's lifetime (overdiagnosis), as well as the harms of unnecessary earlier treatment of breast cancer that would have become clinically apparent but would not have shortened a woman's life. Radiation exposure (from radiologic tests), although a minor concern, is also a consideration."

The blog, Science-Based Medicine, has a thoughtful and thorough discussion of the issue, written before the recent recommendations. I highly recommend it.

In a rather odd move, the Times published a balancing article by Roni Caryn Rabin on the same day (at least in the paper edition), although it was buried in the "Health" section, not on the front page with Kolata's.

Rabin's story empathetically interviews screening advocates, including people who have been treated for breast cancer. But in its empathy, story misses the opportunity to clarify the issues. Or perhaps in the extended quotes, the author is deliberately allowing the sources to reveal themselves? It's hard to tell.

For example, one woman calls screening her "security blanket." "'If someone ran a computer analysis that determined that wearing a seat belt is not going to protect you from being killed during a crash, would you stop using a seat belt?' Ms. Young-Levi asked."

Although it's hard to imagine, I certainly would stop using a seat belt if the best evidence indicated it, whatever psychological security I might ascribe to it.

The story later quotes another survivor: "'You're going to start losing a lot of women,' said Sylvia Moritz, 54, of Manhattan, who learned she had breast cancer at 48 after an annual mammogram. 'I have two friends in their 40s who were just diagnosed with breast cancer. One of them just turned 41. If they had waited until she was 50 to do a routine mammogram, they wouldn't have to bother on her part — she'd be dead.'"

The author negligently lets this quote stand: the whole point of the recommendations is that if those friends had not been diagnosed, they might be doing just fine now, without the risk of the tests and procedures they underwent because of the diagnosis.

But the unfortunate reality is that we need tests that better predict cancer progression, rather than merely signaling its presence. Without such tests, the recommendations can only trade off lives lost (and other damage) because treatment was unnecessarily aggressive with other lives lost because it wasn't aggressive enough.