THOUSANDS of lives are saved by breast cancer screening programmes, leading epidemiologists told Â鶹´«Ã½ this week. Their views flatly contradict claims by Danish researchers that were widely publicised last week.
Peter Gøtzsche and Ole Olsen of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen examined eight surveys of the effectiveness of screening programmes, which followed half a million women in Canada, Scotland, Sweden and the US. The surveys compared the death rates from breast cancer for women who had regular X-rays with those who did not. Gøtzsche and Olsen discarded six of the studies as being unsound. From the two that…
