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Breast cancer

The importance of overdiagnosis in breast-cancer screening

The results of three recent studies demand that more attention be placed on defining the most-appropriate approach to population-based breast-cancer screening, in particular regarding the potential harms of increasing overdiagnosis. Two of these studies report that more-sensitive detection of breast neoplasms is possible by 3D tomography and by MRI, but the third paper raises the question of whether this increased sensitivity is desirable.

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Correspondence to Steven Narod.

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Narod, S. The importance of overdiagnosis in breast-cancer screening. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 13, 5–6 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2015.203

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