Study Finds Some Cancers May Go Away
Cancer researchers have known for years that it was possible in rare cases for some cancers to go away on their own. Now, a new study suggests that even invasive cancers may sometimes go away without treatment and in larger numbers than anyone ever believed.
From the New York Times:
At the moment, the finding has no practical applications because no one knows whether a detected cancer will disappear or continue to spread or kill.
And some experts remain unconvinced.
“Their simplification of a complicated issue is both overreaching and alarming,” said Robert A. Smith, director of breast cancer screening at the American Cancer Society.
But others, including Robert M. Kaplan, the chairman of the department of health services at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, are persuaded by the analysis. The implications are potentially enormous, Dr. Kaplan said.
If the results are replicated, he said, it could eventually be possible for some women to opt for so-called watchful waiting, monitoring a tumor in their breast to see whether it grows. “People have never thought that way about breast cancer,” he added.
Dr. Kaplan and his colleague, Dr. Franz Porzsolt, an oncologist at the University of Ulm, said in an editorial that accompanied the study, “If the spontaneous remission hypothesis is credible, it should cause a major re-evaluation in the approach to breast cancer research and treatment.”
The study was conducted by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a researcher at the VA Outcomes Group in White River Junction, Vt., and Dartmouth Medical School; Dr. Per-Henrik Zahl of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health; and Dr. Jan Maehlen of Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo. It compared two groups of women ages 50 to 64 in two consecutive six-year periods.
One group of 109,784 women was followed from 1992 to 1997. Mammography screening in Norway was initiated in 1996. In 1996 and 1997, all were offered mammograms, and nearly every woman accepted.
The second group of 119,472 women was followed from 1996 to 2001. All were offered regular mammograms, and nearly all accepted.
It might be expected that the two groups would have roughly the same number of breast cancers, either detected at the end or found along the way. Instead, the researchers report, the women who had regular routine screenings had 22 percent more cancers. For every 100,000 women who were screened regularly, 1,909 were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer over six years, compared with 1,564 women who did not have regular screening.
There are other explanations, but researchers say that they are less likely than the conclusion that the tumors disappeared.
Tags: American Cancer Society, Archives of Internal Medicine, Breast Cancer, Cancer, Cancer Goes Away, Cancer Research, Cancer Study, Cancer Treatment, Franz Porzsolt, Gilbert Welch, Jan Maehlen, Per-Henrik Zahl, Robert Kaplan, Robert Smith, Tumor
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