Risk-based breast cancer screening: What are the challenges?

Abstract

Population-based screening programs aim to detect the disease at an early stage, so less treatment will be needed as well as having better oncological outcomes when diagnosed earlier. In the majority of European countries, breast cancer screening programs are designed based on women age.Meta-analysis of randomized clinical trial data demonstrates a reduction in the relative risk of breast cancer mortality due to screening, which has been estimated to be approximately 20%.One of the controversies about the population breast screening programs is that age-based screening ignores women's individual breast cancer risk. Identification of high-risk women may intensify the screening measures and will optimize the population screening programs to align them to individual risks.Family history of breast cancer is one of the risk factors to consider along with the recently developed polygenic risk scores to stratify women into a risk group. Other factors to assess risk include: mammographic breast density; B3 lesions with atypia in breast biopsy specimens; hormonal and lyfestyle and, potentially, epigenetic markers. Still, there are some difficulties in validating these factors and reflecting the interaction between risk factors in the models.Ongoing screening trials (e.g., WISDOM and MyPebs) are currently evaluating the clinical acceptability and utility of risk-stratified screening programs in the general population, and should provide valuable information for the possible implementation of such programs.Communication of complex risk information to the women, as well as assessing ethical concerns need to be addressed before implementation of risk stratified programs.

Keywords: breast cancer; risk reducing surgery; risk-based; screening.