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. 2024 Mar;31(1):3-7.
doi: 10.1177/09691413231186686. Epub 2023 Jul 12.

Beneficial effect of repeated participation in breast cancer screening upon survival

Stephen W Duffy  1 , Amy Ming-Fang Yen  2 , Laszlo Tabar  3 , Abbie Ting-Yu Lin  4 , Sam Li-Sheng Chen  2 , Chen-Yang Hsu  5 , Peter B Dean  6 , Robert A Smith  7 , Tony Hsiu-Hsi Chen  4
Affiliations

Beneficial effect of repeated participation in breast cancer screening upon survival

Stephen W Duffy et al. J Med Screen. 2024 Mar.

Abstract

Objectives: The benefit of mammography screening in reducing population mortality from breast cancer is well established. In this paper, we estimate the effect of repeated participation at scheduled screens on case survival.

Methods: We analysed incidence and survival data on 37,079 women from nine Swedish counties who had at least one to five invitation(s) to screening prior to diagnosis, and were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1992 and 2016. Of these, 4564 subsequently died of breast cancer. We estimated the association of survival with participation in up to the most recent five screens before diagnosis. We used proportional hazards regression to estimate the effect on survival of the number of scheduled screens in which subjects participated prior to the diagnosis of breast cancer.

Results: There was successively better survival with an increasing number of screens in which the subject participated. For a woman with five previous screening invitations who participated in all five, the hazard ratio was 0.28 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.25-0.33, p < 0.0001) compared to a woman attending none (86.9% vs 68.9% 20-year survival). Following a conservative adjustment for potential self-selection factors, the hazard ratio was 0.34 (95% CI 0.26-0.43, p < 0.0001), an approximate three-fold reduction in the hazard of dying from breast cancer.

Conclusion: For those women who develop breast cancer, regular prior participation in mammography screening confers significantly better survival.

Keywords: breast cancer; mammography; survival.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Survival by the number of screens attended for those with five previous invitations.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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