This Is Why Mammogram Don't Save Lives
Your doctor may tell you that mammograms are the best way to prevent breast cancer at any age. But are they?
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network recommends starting screening as young as 25 for women with a BRCA mutation. Yet these mutations only account for about 1-in-10 breast cancer cases. Worse yet…
Getting regular mammograms this young means more total radiation exposure throughout your lifetime… And repeated exposure can make you up to 2.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer. But perhaps worst of all...
A new study found that mammograms aren’t saving as many lives as expected from the age group at highest risk—40 and older.
Researchers from Harvard and Dartmouth tracked over 53,000 women with breast cancer for 10 years across the U.S.
They found that mammograms led to a 16% increase in cancer diagnoses for every 10% increase in screening rates.
That sounds like good news. But most of these were overdiagnoses. That’s because the screenings caught small tumors that never grew… Ones that would be harmless if left untouched.
No surprise there… More than half of breast cancer cases are the result of overdiagnosis.
Even more shocking? The death rate remained about the same… There was only about a 10% decrease in breast cancer deaths due to early detection from mammogram screenings.
This is far from the results you’d hope to find from a procedure that leads to high rates of overdiagnosis and overtreatment… And with dangerous chemotherapy drugs, no less.