Breast cancer screening didn’t do much to save women’s lives, study finds

Breast cancer deaths have declined markedly in the Netherlands since a nationwide screening program began in 1989, but mammograms deserve little — if any — of the credit, a new study suggests.

In fact, the main effect of inviting Dutch women between the ages of 50 and 74 to get a mammogram every other year has been a steady increase in cases of early-stage breast cancers. More than half of these cancers were harmless and would have gone totally unnoticed if women hadn’t had mammograms in the first place, the study authors report.

As more women were invited to join the screening program and the screenings became more high-tech, the overall benefit of those mammograms fell.