Controversy over handling breast cancer

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - An unusual study is causing quite a controversy over how to handle breast cancer.

As Doctor Peter Ostrow reports, the results of this research suggest some cancers might go away without treatment.

Mammograms find early breast cancers, so we can treat them. But would some of them go away if we left them alone?

That's one possible explanation for the surprising results of a report in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine.

The authors followed more than 200,000 women, age 50-64.

For six years about half had a mammogram every two years, while the rest had only one, at the end.

Both groups would be expected to end up with the same number of tumors, but the group that had only one mammogram had about twenty percent fewer.

Doctor Stephen Edge (Roswell Park Cancer Institute) said, "There appear to be slightly fewer breast cancers in the group of women who weren't screened, suggesting that those tumors might have been present, but went away on their own. That's a really interesting argument; there's going to be a lot of discussion about it, but there is not a single case in that report of any individual woman who was defined to have a breast cancer, failed to undergo treatment, and had the cancer regress."

Dr. Edge is Chief or Breast Surgery at Roswell Park. He points out that this report should not discourage women from having Mammograms, or being treated.

"Women who will hear this will say, 'Oh, I don't need to have my mammogram,' and the fact is women who are screened are less likely to die from breast cancer."

"The take-home message right now is that women should still continue to have their Mammograms and just as, or more importantly, that a woman with breast cancer should undergo appropriate treatment."