HEALTH & SCIENCE

New findings add to muddled message for effective breast cancer detection

Self-awareness is the new catchword, a change from years of advice to rigorously practice monthly self-exams.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Oct. 28, 2002.

Washington -- Women may feel they are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to identifying an adequate technique to detect breast cancer early, and their physicians may need to help extricate them.

The value of mammography came under heightened scrutiny a year ago, and now the benefit of breast self-exams is being questioned.

While the message is still conveyed in handouts and public service announcements urging women to perform monthly breast exams, there has been a low-key shift in medical opinion away from the worth of self-exams in cutting breast cancer deaths.

The suggestion that women learn an admittedly difficult procedure and carry it out faithfully at the same time each month has been supplanted, say many experts, by a more general recommendation that women should become well-acquainted with their bodies and report any change in their breasts to their physicians.

The final word, at least for now, on breast self-exams was carried in a study published Oct. 2 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The study, done in China by researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, found that "programs to encourage [breast self-exams] in the absence of mammography would be unlikely to reduce mortality from breast cancer."

Half of the 266,000 women in the study were provided with intensive instruction on properly conducting a self-exam, while the other half served as a control group. During the 12-year study, there were 135 breast cancer deaths in the group that received instruction and 131 in the control group. [...]

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