| NHS breast cancer screening methods criticised | Posted on 19/01/2010 in Medical Government/ NHS related news The methods the NHS uses to screen women for breast cancer have come under fire this week.
According to research conducted by the Nordic Cochrane Centre and published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, screening for the disease does little to save people's lives and 7,000 women are wrongly diagnosed annually.
Karsten Juhl Jorgensen, the lead author of the study, commented that one in five women who have been screened for a decade are recalled unnecessarily, the Telegraph informed.
Some of those women will have had further testing such as a biopsy taken by inserting a needle into the 'tumour' and three per cent will have had surgery.
The newspaper quotes the report as stating that a drop in breast cancer deaths "is likely caused by improved treatment, which can explain why it has been similarly large among the young women who have not been invited to screening".
Last month, a study conducted by scientists at Kaiser Permanente in California found that women who drink at least three to four beverages per week are 1.3 times more likely to experience a recurrence of breast cancer than those who consume fewer alcoholic drinks.Other news stories from 19/01/2010
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