New Study Confirms Some Breast Cancers Disappear on Their Own

Posted By Dr. Mercola | December 22 2011 | 729 views

A study that has received little media attention suggests that many tumors found by mammograms – including a significant number of those that are routinely treated with surgery -- would most likely have simply vanished on their own.  The finding calls into question the value of current breast cancer screening techniques.

Mammography creates risks that include false positives and unnecessary treatment of nonlethal malignancies, and many recent analyses have shown that it brings relatively little benefits in terms of saving lives.

Canada.com reports:

"The team looked at two large, age-matched groups of women ... [O]ne cohort of about 300,000 received annual mammograms for six years. A control group underwent no screening for the first four years, then had mammograms in the last two. Conventional thinking would suggest that the cumulative number of cancers found in both groups would be about the same at the end of the six years. Surprisingly ... [t]he cohort of women who were screened annually ... had accumulated significantly more tumors ... The only explanation for why the unscreened women would have fewer cancers, the authors concluded, is that many breast tumors appear, then spontaneously just go away."

This is not the first time research has revealed this kind of result.  A 2009 study found that spontaneous remission of breast cancer is quite common, with even invasive cancers disappearing on their own more than twenty percent of the time.

Sources:

  Canada.com December 15, 2011

  Dartmouth Medicine Spring 2009