More Early-Stage Breast Cancer, But It's Good News
There's been an awful lot of back-and-forth. Should women get mammograms? Should they not? Do mammograms really help? Or are they just a waste of money? Now a new study has found that mammography has, indeed, led to fewer late-stage breast cancers, according to newswise.com. In the last 30 years, since mammography was introduced, late-stage breast cancer incidence has decreased by 37 percent, a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center finds. The analysis takes into account an observed underlying trend of increased breast cancer incidence present since the 1940s, a sort of inflation rate for breast cancer, the Web site reports. Researchers looked at early-stage and late-stage breast cancer diagnoses between 1977-1979, before mammography became popular, and compared it to diagnoses between 2007-2009. Based on trends observed in the pre-mammography period of the 1940s to the 1970s as well as continued trends over time, t...