- State laws requiring women with dense breasts to be told about the benefits of following up a mammogram with further tests are associated with higher rates of additional screening and more diagnoses for breast cancer, a U.S. study finds.
For the current study, researchers examined data on screening and cancer diagnoses for more than 1.4 million women ages 40 to 59 in nine states with dense breast notification laws and 25 states without these laws. It's not clear from the current study to what extent dense breast notification laws might lead to so-called over-diagnosis, which can cause women to undergo needless testing or treatments for relatively harmless tumors; it's also not clear how many lives might be saved by catching aggressive cancers sooner when they're easier to treat.