Health Information - Two Screening Programs for Breast Cancer Show Efficiency

Two Screening Programs for Breast Cancer Show Efficiency

However the Norway approach incurs lower recall rate for abnormal mammogram results than in the US.

A recent report says that both the U.S. and the Norwegian strategies of breast Cancer screening are equally efficient in detecting the disease. However, the average U.S approach usually requires women to be tested twice as often as the strategy being employed in Norway.

A conventional doctor- and self-referral screening method fared well against the Norwegian strategy wherein the government sends written invitations to all women in a certain age group to undergo a screening mammogram. This is the finding of a study published in the July 29 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The target of the Norway strategy is to screen women every two years, whereas the U.S. “opportunistic screening” programs recommend an annual screening mammogram for women.

When the researchers compared the U.S. strategy as applied to 45,050 women in Vermont against the Norwegian approach applied to 194, 430 women in Norway from 1997 to 2003, they discovered a similarity in the age-adjusted screening detection rate of cancers between the two said populations (2.77 for every 1000 women-years in Vermont versus 2.57 in Norway).

But whereas in the Vermont study 9.8 percent of the women screened were recalled for further examination, only 2.7 percent were recalled in Norway (about three times lower than in the U.S.).

However, when all cancers diagnosed during regular screening were combined with those detected between screening mammograms, no significant variations were noted in the prognostic characteristics of invasive cancers diagnosed in the two populations.

Due to the shorter interval between screenings, the authors of the report offered this hypothesis, “Vermont women and/or their health care providers may more readily pursue evaluation of symptoms and clinical findings than their Norwegian counterparts."

The team further reported that their findings reveal that in spite of the longer screening intervals employed in Norway, its organized population-based screening strategy attained similar results as the opportunistic screening method applied in Vermont.