Breast cancer
IN PHOTO: Pink balloons are displayed in front of an artificial waterfall during the "Pink Ribbon" breast cancer awareness campaign at Cheonggye Stream in central Seoul October 5, 2011. The annual campaign is held to promote awareness of breast cancer and to support the fight against it. Reuters/Jo Yong-Hak

Women who go for breast cancer screening will have a 40% reduced risk of dying from the disease, experts say. The new findings will hopefully end the controversy surrounding the need for mammograms.

The International Agency for Cancer Research, or IARC, has weighed in the benefits of breast cancer screening that has divided the scientific community for many years. According to reports, some scientists do not believe that mammograms are necessary. In fact, they believe that the process does more harm by identifying small cancers--which then gets treated with chemotherapy--that had never been considered a real threat.

According to Stephen Duffy, a professor in London’s Queen Mary University and a member of IARC expert panel, the new analysis should reassure women that breast cancer screening can save lives. “The evidence proves breast screening is a vital tool in increasing early diagnosis of breast cancer and therefore reducing the number of deaths,” he said in The Guardian report.

In the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers noted that women from ages 50 to 69 who underwent mammography screening had 40 percent less chance of surrendering to the disease compared to those women who did not. The study was performed by experts hailing from 16 different countries, who analysed various breast cancer detection methods from 40 observational studies and 11 controlled clinical trials.

The published paper stated that there is insufficient evidence to prove the effectiveness of screening among younger women between 40 and 49 years old. It also described how several previous studies suggested that screening can save lives of older people, aged 70 to 74.

As for the conclusion, experts said that mammography through the use of X-rays can be beneficial in the detection of breast cancer. However, Duffy hopes that other screening methods, such as the “digital breast tomosynthesis”, will also be proven to be helpful in due time.

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