It depends on the country. Overdiagnosis relates to the finding of a cancer that doesn’t act in a life-limiting way. Since the beginning of mammography and PSA eras we have diagnosed a lot of such disease.Mammography has not changed the percentage of women who have metastatic disease, rather it has increased the diagnosis of breast cancer enormously with many, many of these not a threat to life.With respect to PSA screening it’s not clear at all whether it saves lives, either. But such screening increases the number of patients diagnosed and treated for non-disease.But the problem is that up to now we haven’t been able to distinguish disease from non-disease very well so we treat people to be sure. But we’re entering into the era of personalised medicine. Recently an excellent paper was published showing the size of a breast tumour does not signal malignant behaviour nearly as much as its genetic makeup.
A benign tumor means it’s not cancer. These tumors don’t spread to other parts of the body and are usually not life-threatening. However, depending on their size or location, they may need to be removed if they press on important organs or cause discomfort.
Tamoxifen is a highly effective endocrine treatment for breast cancer in the adjuvant and metastatic settings. Data from several large randomized clinical trials indicate that tamoxifen is also valuable in the prevention of breast cancer in women at high risk for the disease. However, not all women ....
The risk is so low that it is impossible to read using tables of published health data and statistics. Children do get cancer, but very rarely breast cancer. Statistics will often group women aged 15–39 as “young women” but this is very misleading as the bump in cases begins in women over 20, or eve....
Deepak Kumar
It depends on the country. Overdiagnosis relates to the finding of a cancer that doesn’t act in a life-limiting way. Since the beginning of mammography and PSA eras we have diagnosed a lot of such disease.Mammography has not changed the percentage of women who have metastatic disease, rather it has increased the diagnosis of breast cancer enormously with many, many of these not a threat to life.With respect to PSA screening it’s not clear at all whether it saves lives, either. But such screening increases the number of patients diagnosed and treated for non-disease.But the problem is that up to now we haven’t been able to distinguish disease from non-disease very well so we treat people to be sure. But we’re entering into the era of personalised medicine.
Recently an excellent paper was published showing the size of a breast tumour does not signal malignant behaviour nearly as much as its genetic makeup.