Breast cancer screening - false positive results

Dear WDDTY

I write to thank you for the the article on breast cancer (Vol 3 No 10). I became interested in the subject about 12 years ago when a colleague became seriously ill with this disease and showed me the burnmarks that radiation treatment had made on her skin. Just about this time there was launched in Edinburgh a breast screening campaign which involved thousands of women from this city. The campaign was to run for eight years with volunteers having a mammogram every other year. For nearly all these years the director was Dr Maureen M Roberts, who to begin with was a perhaps over enthusiastic believer that mammography was the answer to longer life for breast cancer sufferers.

As you may know, Dr Roberts had the courage to write in the British Medical Journal that the trials had failed to prove anything. She even admitted that there had been a number of false positive results. Shortly after this Dr Roberts herself died of breast cancer. S S, Edinburgh......