Oxford trial at root of disaster

A TRIAL designed to see if extending the age range of breast screening reduces deaths from breast cancer may unwittingly have led to women dying unnecessarily from the disease.

The Oxford-led study, called AgeX, was set up to test whether it would be beneficial for women aged 47 to 49 and 71 to 73 to routinely be offered screenings.

Backed by Public Health England and the NHS Breast Screening Programme, it has been taking place in 5 breast screening services across England. It is thought that the computer glitch which caused the error was programmed into the system at the start of the trial in 2009 and ran through to 2018.

The algorithm randomly selected half of women in the additional age groups to be screened for cancer and half not to be.

But the program appears to have cancelled the last routine scan women in the older group should have had before their 70th. As a result, it is thought that many women aged between aged 8 and 71 during that period did not have their last mammogram.

While those assigned extra screening will have been checked, those in the control group are the 450,000 women who missed out.

Women are currently invited for routine screening every three years between 50 and 70, although people over this age can request to continue screenings.