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medpundit |
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Thursday, March 20, 2003A study released Tuesday challenges the medical protocol of advising women whose mammograms show questionable-but-benign lumps to return for follow-up examinations. Nearly all such women fail to develop breast cancer from such lumps, researchers said. "There is a problem in that the recommendation is being applied more often than experts in the field think it should be," senior study author Dr. Patrick Romano, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, told United Press International. Overuse of these short-interval follow-up mammograms "might be that radiologists are very conservative when they find an abnormality," he added. Romano's team studied 58,408 postmenopausal American women who were screened for breast cancer as part of the Women's Health Initiative, an ongoing, long-term national study launched in 1991. Of the participants, 5 percent or 2,927 women were advised to undergo a short-interval follow-up after their initial mammograms. After two years of such follow-up, the rate of newly diagnosed breast cancers among these women with suspicious-but-benign lumps was remarkably low -- only 1 percent compared with 0.6 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively, for patients whose initial mammograms were characterized as benign or negative That’s because practicing radiologists have a strong sense of self-preservation. They don’t want to have to explain to a jury why that equivocal, benign appearing area on the mammogram turned out to be cancer, no matter how small the risk of that is. Trial lawyers have the benefit of always having 20/20 hindsight, and it’s far too easy to go back to a mammogram that appeared benign before the diagnosis of cancer and find fault with the reading. The jury doesn’t care if the overall incidence of cancer in these cases is 1%, they only see a woman with a cancer death sentence, or a family deprived of its wife and mother. Doubtful that this study will change any of that. posted by Sydney on 3/20/2003 07:35:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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