Information to women invited to mammography screening

Information to women invited to mammography screening Since screening is testing of healthy people for a potential unrecognized disease and screening tests necessarily has to be both cost efficient and as little invasive as possible, it is inevitable that some people are misclassified [1]. Misclassified in the meaning that some people test positive although they after thorough examinations turn out to be free of the disease (a falsepositive test) and some people test negative although they are diagnosed with the disease before the next screening (falsenegative test). The burden of false-positive tests and falsenegative tests expected from participating in a screening programme form part of the background information needed for people to take an informed decision of whether or not to participate in screening. Critics have widely argued that the women who are to decide whether or not to participate in mammography screening do not get this important information or do not get the right information. For example, Jørgensen et al. [2], write: ‘The risk of false positive diagnosis was downplayed. It was given as the risk per screening round and not total risk after several rounds’. It is therefore most welcome that estimates on this cumulative risk now are published from more and more programmes. In this issue of Annals of Oncology, cumulative risks from the longstanding Nijmegen programme, the Netherlands, are published [3]. Whereas most of the previous articles [4–10] only report estimates of the cumulative risk for a false-positive test, Otten et al. estimates the cumulative risk for recall, screen-detected breast cancers (invasive and invasive