I have repeatedly questioned the value of screening, particularly cancer screening in extending life. I am, predictably, mildly annoyed by the term “preventing death”, since death is unpreventable.
Regardless, a new Swedish study pushes back on my assertions
The study of 130,000 women in two communities in Sweden showed 30 percent fewer women in the screening group died of breast cancer and that this effect persisted year after year.
Now, 29 years after the study began, the researchers found that the number of women saved from breast cancer goes up with each year of screening.
"We’ve found that the longer we look, the more lives are saved," Professor Stephen Duffy of Queen Mary, University of London, whose study was published in the journal Radiology, said in a statement.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
Tuesday ~ June 28th, 2011 at 12:06 pm
batterseapower
Interesting, but:
1. Screening might cause some women to be needlessly operated on for cancers that would not have been fatal within their lifetime
2. Even if there are less deaths from cancer there may be more deaths from surgery complications, or quality-of-life reductions from being told the diagnosis. Furthermore, the very fact that screening increases visits to hospital increases the chance that the screened people will catch an infectious disease.
3. Days lost visiting the hospital for screening, followup checks etc themselves constitute a loss of useful time. In aggregate, this could outweigh the days of life saved by operating on the cancer
So it is not clear to me whether this study constitutes evidence that screening improves lifespan and hence should be increased. Perhaps the paper addresses these points, but I can’t find it online.
Tuesday ~ June 28th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Apex
On a previous post you made concerning screening for Breast, Colon, Prostate, and Lung cancer you referenced 4 studies that purported to show no decrease in mortality rates from screening for those cancers. However as I commented on that post, when looking into the studies that were linked in the post, the ones for both Breast and Colon did in fact claim to have statistically significant decreases in mortality rates for those who were screened. As I pointed out on that comment they did equivocate on whether the benefits outweighed the false positives but they did not equivocate on the fact that mortality rates were reduced.
This Swedish study is another example in the breast cancer argument. It seems that studies do show screening is effective for some forms of cancer at reducing mortality rates.
My comment on that post can be found here:
http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/05/23/the-audacity-of-prevention-cancer-screening-generally/#comments
Wednesday ~ June 29th, 2011 at 10:45 am
Patrick
Silly verbal points aren’t worth making. Do you really think people who use the expression ‘Preventing death’ mean to say that they are preventing death forever? Is there any other way a reasonably person could interpret this expression that would allow them to not treat those who use it like idiots? Yes, there is. In addition to naming a general feature of life, the word ‘death’ can also name an event, as in ‘there was a death in the family’. Can you prevent a death? Yes, pretty easily.