Stress of Cancer Scare May Last Years - Well - The New York Times

The psychological fallout from a false positive mammogram test result can last up to three years, a new study has found.

Over a one-year period in which 30,000 women were screened, Danish researchers found 446 women over 50 with abnormal mammograms, both true and false positives, and matched them with 864 women from the same clinics with normal findings. The study appears in the March/April issue of The Annals of Family Medicine.

The women completed a well-validated questionnaire after their mammogram, and then again periodically over a three-year period. The questionnaire included sections on sleeping, appetite, anger, worry about the future and other measures of psychological well-being.

At six months after being found cancer-free, women with false-positive findings had negative changes in measures of psychosocial functioning as great as those who were actually diagnosed with breast cancer. The negative feelings faded over time, but even after three years, these women still displayed higher levels of distress than those with normal findings.

In some studies, the United States rate of false positives ranges as high as 60 percent after 10 yearly screenings, said the lead author, John Brodersen, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen. ?The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended screenings only every other year and only for women over 50,? he added. ?Doing this would be a way of lowering the false positive rates.?

Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/stress-of-cancer-scare-may-last-years/

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