Detecting Breast Cancer in Women with Dense Breasts
Dan L. Longo · New England Journal of Medicine · 2019
Screening asymptomatic patients for cancer is based on a simple premise: cancers that are detected early before they produce symptoms should be easier to cure than those that progress to become clinically detectable. In practice, tools have been developed to realize the detection of clinically undetectable cancers, but the effect of their application on overall survival has been enormously challenging to demonstrate. Several factors contribute to the difficulty in proving the value of cancer screening. First, any test will have false negatives, in which case a patient’s cancer goes undetected. Second, tests for cancer are quite often falsely positive because . . .