What if you were diagnosed with breast cancer after a traditional mammogram, but your doctor told you not to worry about it, it would go away?
Study: Some Cancers Disappear
Recent findings suggest that could happen one day, based on a study that found a 22 percent higher rate of the cancer detected in women who had mammograms every two years, compared to a group that received them every six years.
Cancer researchers have encountered singular cases of cancers that disappeared without treatment. Some kidney cancers and melanomas go away. Neuroblastoma, the most common cancer among infants, can regress to a harmless state.
But since it would be unthinkable to leave most cancer untreated, the instance of invasive cancers that disappear on their own has never been documented. The new research, done in Norway on two groups of women ages 50 to 64, suggests that the numbers of cancers that vanish is much larger than anyone thought.
New Cancer Treatment Guidelines Possible
Dr. Robert M. Kaplan, chairman of the department of health services at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that the implications may be enormous. If the findings are supported by further research, it may be possible in time to institute guidelines for tumors that require only “watchful waiting,” or checking to make sure they don’t grow.
Dr. Kaplan and his colleague, Dr. Franz Porzsolt, an oncologist at the University of Ulm, noted: “If the spontaneous remission hypothesis is credible, it should cause a major re-evaluation in the approach to breast cancer research and treatment” in an opinion paper that was released with the study.
However, some experts are skeptical.
The researchers’ simplified analysis of a complex issue is alarming, said Robert A. Smith, director of breast cancer screening at the American Cancer Society.
Mammograms Useful
Mammograms save lives, health professionals said, although it now appears that some cancers they detect don’t need to be treated. At this point, there is no way for doctors to know which ones those may be.
The research was done on two large groups of women in Norway, where mammography screening began in 1996.
The first group of 109,754 was monitored from 1992 to 1997. Almost all of these women agreed to screening in 1996 or 1997. The second group of 119,472 women was offered regular mammograms between 1996 and 2001, and almost all accepted.
Theoretically, the two groups would have roughly the same number of breast cancers. However, while 1,564 women in the first group were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer over the six-year period, 1,909 women in the second group that was screened more often got the same diagnosis.
For further information: “The Natural History of Invasive Breast Cancers Detected by Screening Mammography,” by Per-Henrik Zahl, Jan Maehlen, H. Gilbert Welch, Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 168, No. 21.
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