Evening Press Leader

Reports published in medical journals might once have merely interested a minority audience, but not any longer.

Health stories are big news for today's media, and rightly so, for there is little more important than your well being.

One side effect of the heightened interest in health issues is that medical studies in specialist publications now reach a wider public. So it is that we are today being told that, so sum up the headlines, "breast screening is a waste of time".

This astonishing claim is made by a controversial report published in the Lancet, the leading medical journal. A Danish study suggests that screening women for breast cancer is a waste of time because it does not reduce death rates.

The study looked again at major trials of breast cancer screening that were undertaken in Sweden, Scotland, Canada and the United States. These trials involved half a million women and are used to justify national screening programmes in Britain and elsewhere.

Dr Peter Gotzsche and Ole Olsen, the Danes who carried out the study, concluded that "there is no reliable evidence that screening decreases breast cancer mortality".

There is a very great danger that following such a statement, women who had been worried about their health might put off going to see their doctor. Or, more alarming still, such women might decide not to have a mammogram after hearing reports of the Danish study.

To put off breast screening would surely be a mistake, possibly even a grave error. It would be better to heed the words of the NHS Breast Cancer Screening Programme, which is strongly urging that "the benefits of screening are not dismissed on the basis of these comments in the Lancet".

Time may well show that the detection and treatment of breast cancer needs to be approached differently, but for now the message to women must be that they should continue to be screened for breast cancer.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.