This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Oncology  • Breast Cancer  • Women's Health  • Women's Health, Other  • Screening  • Mammography  • Drug Therapy, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Harald Weedon-Fekjær, PhD; Ragnhild Sørum, MSc; Marianne Kolstad Brenn, MSc

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In their article, Zahl et al¹ suggest that many breast cancer tumors detected during mammographic screening discontinue their detectability thereafter and may spontaneously regress. They used ecological data to compare 2 different cohorts over 2 different calendar periods, reporting a relative rate of invasive breast cancer of 1.22 (95% confidence interval [CI]; 1.16-1.30) in women who had the opportunity to undergo 3 vs 1 screening examinations. The study, while novel in its design, unfortunately has substantial weaknesses.

The major concern with this result and the subsequent conclusion stems from a time-related differential in HT use in the 2 study cohorts (Figure). Breast cancer incidence has been shown to increase with HT use and is dependent on the estrogen-progesterone composition.² Zahl et al¹ performed a sensitivity analysis based on a study from the United States that reported a 24% . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION


CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

The Natural History of Invasive Breast Cancers Detected by Screening Mammography
Per-Henrik Zahl, Jan Mæhlen, and H. Gilbert Welch
Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(21):2311-2316.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT