Women who find a benign breast lump or cyst are at double the risk of being struck by the disease in the future, research shows. And, as reported by the Mirror, an expert say they may benefit from enhanced screening.
The study of 800,000 Spanish women aged 50 to 69 were screened at least once between 1996 and 2015 and followed up until 2017 by researchers at the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona. Among women with benign breast disease, around 25 out every 1,000 were diagnosed with breast cancer in the next 12 to 20 years. This compares to 15 out of every 1,000 who did not have a lump or cyst.
Study author Dr Marta Román said: “This is important. It suggests that benign breast disease is a key indicator that a woman has a higher risk of breast cancer, rather than simply being something that could develop into a cancer. In fact we often find the benign disease in one breast and then cancer develops in the other breast.
"If a woman is diagnosed with a benign breast disease, and she has other high risk factors, such as a family history of breast cancer, she could benefit from more frequent screening.” Her words were echoed by Professor David Cameron, of Edinburgh University and President of the European Breast Cancer Council, who said: "This large study shows that women in a screening programme who are diagnosed with a benign breast disease appear to be at a higher risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer in the long term and they may therefore benefit from enhanced screening."
It comes as separate research suggesting radiotherapy does not appear to improve survival after 30 years. Researchers at Edinburgh University tracked 600 Scottish breast cancer patients and found that radiotherapy with either chemotherapy or the hormone drug tamoxifen after surgery did cut the risk over the first 10 years.
Three decades after their treatment 24 per cent of women who had radiotherapy were still alive compared to 27.5% of those who did not. Author Prof Ian Kunkler said: “We found that there is no long-term improvement in overall survival for those women having radiotherapy.
“This may be because, although radiotherapy may help to prevent some breast cancer deaths, it may also cause a few more deaths, particularly a long time after the radiotherapy, from other causes such as heart and blood vessel diseases.
“The benefits of having radiotherapy in terms of fewer local recurrences are only accrued over the first 10 years after radiotherapy; thereafter, the rate of local recurrence is similar whether or not patients had radiotherapy." Prof Nazanin Derakhshan, of Reading University, said: “The benefit of radiotherapy with respect to survival to 10 years is clear to see from the data and should be reason enough to choose to treat.”
