A short YouTube video by Jenn Simmons, MD arguing that routine screening mammography provides no overall survival benefit. The speaker gives a numeric example (screening 2,000 women over 10 years saves ~1 life but leads to 10–20 unnecessary treatments), explains the concept of overdiagnosis and downstream harms from treatment (cardiovascular, neurodegenerative disease, osteoporosis), and recommends alternative, lower-harm screening approaches (self-exam, biological tests such as the 'Aria tears test', QT imaging, ultrasound) with an offer to send a safe-screening guide.
Questions this video answers
Approximately 1 life potentially saved and 10–20 women treated unnecessarily.
Chapters
They say it's for your health. But who really benefits from you getting a screening mammogram every year? Because when we look at the data, there is no survival advantage to screening with mammogram. When we screen 2,000 women over 10 years, you will potentially save one woman's life, but you will also cause 10 to 20 women to be treated unnecessarily for breast cancer. Now this is the concept of over diagnosis, where we are picking up things with mammogram that would never have presented over a woman's life, would never have developed into clinical disease and would never have threatened her life. And yet once we pick them up and we give that woman a diagnosis, then we decrease her survival and we decrease the quality of her life. Because when you treat a woman for breast cancer, you increase her risk of cardiovascular disease, you increase her risk of neurodegenerative disease, you increase her risk of, of osteoporosis. And these are already the primary threats to a woman's life. So when we are looking at screening with mammogram, the truth is that the only thing that benefits is the system. Now this is not to say that you shouldn't screen, but there are ways of screening which are effective and safe and painless, by the way. And whenever I talk about screening, I always talk about a comprehensive plan. I talk about doing self breast examination. I talk about things like the Aria tears test, which is a biological test which shows you the inflammatory precursors of breast cancer and lets you know your real risk. And I talk about safe things like QT imaging, like what we do here at Perfection imaging or an ultrasound. So there are safe and effective ways to screen for breast cancer. And there are ways to to not expose women to unnecessary radiation, to not lead to over imaging and unnecessary biopsies, and ways to not over diagnose and over treat. So if you want to learn more about safe screening, let us know and we'll send you my safe screening guide.
