Published 11 August 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b3260
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3260

Letters

Breast screening overdiagnosis

Consensus and decision aids

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Jørgensen and Gøtzsche’s paper showing that overdiagnosis of breast cancer is common in screening programmes has sparked off another round of contested claims about the benefit and harms of screening being broadcast widely to the public.¹ As a profession we have a clear ethical obligation to do a much better job of providing balanced information to women to choose for themselves whether they want to be screened.

We must find a way to achieve professional consensus on the number of women who will have death from breast cancer averted and the number of women who will have breast cancer treatment needlessly so that we can inform women rather than confuse them endlessly with various statistics.

With such consensus, informed choice about mammography screening is possible using decision aids made to best practice standards of risk communication (event rates or natural frequencies to show the numbers for screened and unscreened women).^{2 3} . . . [Full text of this article]

¹ School of Public Health, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

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