The most diagnosed cancer for women and men

Experts issue call to reconsider screening for breast cancer and prostate cancer

Twenty years of screening for breast and prostate cancer – the most diagnosed cancer for women and men – have not brought the anticipated decline in deaths from these diseases, argue experts from the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in an opinion piece published in the “Journal of the American Medical Association.”

Instead, overall cancer rates are higher, many more patients are being treated, and the incidence of aggressive or later-stage disease has not been significantly decreased, the authors conclude. Current screening programs are leading to “potential tumor over-detection and over-treatment,” they write in the Oct. 21, 2009 issue of JAMA.

“Screening does provide some benefit, but the problem is that the benefit is not nearly as much as we hoped and comes at the cost of over-diagnosis and over-treatment,” said Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, professor of surgery and radiology, director of the UCSF Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, and co-leader of the breast oncology program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center...more

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