Dear AuntMinnie Member,
If you don't get it by now, you're not paying attention: Mammography saves lives. The point was illustrated once again in a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine indicating that mammography screening has had a major role in the drop in breast cancer deaths in the U.S.
In the study, a multicenter group developed a statistical model of breast cancer incidence and mortality and applied the model to a dataset representing the period between 1975 and 2000. During the period, breast cancer mortality fell by just over 21%, primarily due to the impact of mammography screening and adjuvant therapies such as tamoxifen and chemotherapy, according to the researchers.
The investigators couldn't place an exact figure on mammography's contribution to the decline, but they estimated it to be between 28% and 65% of the total reduction in deaths. Read all about their findings by clicking here.
The study provides a powerful coda to National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which concludes on Monday. All month we've been featuring expanded coverage of breast imaging topics in our Women's Imaging Digital Community.
You'll find recent stories on setting up a digital library for digital mammography studies, a comparison of computer-aided detection (CAD) versus double reading of mammograms, and an analysis of the results of the Digital Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial (DMIST). Check out our coverage by visiting women.auntminnie.com.
