Switch to annual breast cancer check ‘a lifesaver’

Offering women annual breast cancer checks could save 1,000 lives a year, the Government’s women’s health tsar has said.

Dame Lesley Regan said the current system of screening women aged 50 to 70 once every three years was “not based on scientific evidence”.

The UK’S breast screening programme has the longest gap between screens in the world. In the US it is every one or two years and in Europe every two years.

Dame Lesley, also a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Imperial College, London, said the move to give mammograms once every three years was based on budgets from the 1980s.