Expert Group: IARC Handbooks of Cancer Prevention. Vol.7: Breast Cancer Screening. Lyon, France: IARC; 2002. 248pp.

Excerpt

The latest publication in the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) series of Handbooks of Cancer Prevention is focused on breast cancer screening. The monograph is the outcome of a weeklong meeting of the Working Group on the Evaluation of Cancer-Preventive Strategies that took place in Lyon, France, March 5–12, 2002. The decision to produce a handbook on breast cancer screening was timely for several reasons. First, only a few monographs exist that focus exclusively on breast cancer screening, none of which represent a comprehensive treatment of the subject, and all were published before 1990 [1‐4]. Second, the value of breast cancer screening recently had been challenged by a Cochrane Review [5] on screening for breast cancer with mammography, and a number of independent expert groups had been assembled to evaluate that analysis and the authors' provocative conclusions. Thus, in the presence of another expert group's conclusion that there was no scientific evidence to support the value of mammography, the IARC Working Group's evaluation of the world's literature on the efficacy of breast cancer screening had an extra dimension of drama. Contrary to the Cochrane Review, the IARC Working Group affirmed the value of mammography for women aged 50–69. …