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medpundit |
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Friday, December 06, 2002Doerger reviewed the records of more than 1,800 women who had undergone mammography for breast cancer screening and also had undergone angiography to assess condition of coronary arties within the same 12-month period. Then he devised a simple scoring method for the number of calcified breast arteries that could be seen on the mammogram. There are three main breast arteries, and if all three were visible in both breasts, the patient was given a rating of 3. Doerger found if a woman had a score of 1.5 or higher, she had a 20 percent increased risk of heart disease. Higher scores did not increase the risk further. Proceed with caution. The findings haven't been published. They haven't even been presented to a scientific meeting yet. The raw data aren't available. We don't even know what other sorts of variables were involved - did the women with calcifications also have diabetes or high blood pressure, which would put them at high risk anyway for heart disease? Who knows? The guy has gone to the press before he has gone to his colleagues - always a bad sign. It makes it all the harder to refute weak findings. posted by Sydney on 12/06/2002 07:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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