Breast screening scandal may affect another 140,000
THE breast cancer screening scandal could have affected 140,000 more women, an expert has warned.
Jeremy Hunt revealed earlier this month that hundreds of thousands of women aged 68 to 71 had not been invited to their last mammogram.
The Health Secretary said the error – feared to have cut short up to 270 lives – had been caused by a computer glitch dating back to 2009.
But Professor Peter Sasieni, a cancer screening researcher at King’s College London, said the problems may have begun as early as 2005.
He estimates that those extra four years saw 140,000 women miss screenings.
In a letter published in The Lancet, Professor Sasieni said that, in 2004/05, the number of invitations sent to women aged 65 to 70 was ‘very low’. One in three eligible women should have been invited every year – but Professor Sasieni claimed the figures showed it was lower than this in 2005/6, at 31 per cent.
By comparison, 34 to 38 per cent of those aged between 50 and 64 were invited each year.
Professor Sasieni, who is also lead investigator of the Cancer Research UK programme in cancer screening, criticised NHS officials for not looking at the invitation figures.
His letter states: ‘Data that might have alerted people to the lower- than- expected number of invitations being sent to women aged 70 were publicly available, but no one looked at them carefully enough. Some of the fault lies in the way the data was presented, but it is also unclear whose responsibility it is to monitor such outcomes.’ According to his calculations, the total affected over the 13 years before the problem was discovered this January was 502,000 women.
He said: ‘It is important that the computer systems used to run our cancer screening programmes are reviewed and, if necessary, replaced – and that detailed anonymous data is made available for independent scrutiny.’
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, who is chief executive of charity Breast Cancer Now, said: ‘It’s concerning to hear the suggestion that even more women may have been affected by missed screening invitations, and we urge Public Health England to make clear the full extent of the error as soon as possible. Major evi- dence has shown that routine screening prevents deaths from breast cancer, and the earlier the disease is detected, the more likely treatment is to be successful.’
The error raised questions over the competence of Public Health England, the body in charge of the breast cancer screening programme.
But Professor John Newton, of PHE, criticised Professor Sasieni’s research.
He said: ‘This is a flawed analysis which fails to take into account some important facts, such as when the breast screening programme was rolled out to all 70-year-olds in England or when a clinical trial was started called Age X.’
An independent review is under way and women who missed screenings have been offered catch-up mammograms. When he revealed the scandal, Mr Hunt warned that the number of women affected from 2009 to this year could be as high as 450,000.
‘No one looked carefully enough’