Breast cancer risk, chances increased by false positive mammograms

Breast cancer claims so many lives every year as the most common form of cancer in women. In 2012, nearly 1.7 million new cases were diagnosed, the World Cancer Research Fund International reports. A new study coming from researchers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and published in the Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, shows that women who have a history of false-positive mammogram results may have a higher risk of developing cancer for up to 10 years following the false-positive result, EurekAlert reports.

According to TIME, researchers analyzed data from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) about 1.3 million women who undergone mammograms between 1994 and 2009. The study population was composed of seven registries across the United States, including 2.2 million screening mammograms performed in 1.3 million women aged 40 to 74 years. Following their initial screening, the women were tracked for the next 10 years, so that the researchers could evaluate the participants' cancer risk over time.

Results showed that in women who had false positive readings had a 39 percent higher risk of developing breast cancer in the next 10 years compared to the women who did not. Study author Louise M. Henderson, PhD, assistant professor of radiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, clarified, however, that receiving a false positive result does not mean one is more likely to develop cancer.

"I wouldn’t say that if you have a false positive that you are going to go on to have cancer," Dr. Henderson explained. Instead, "it’s a marker for something suspicious."

FOX News reports that when a woman receives a false positive or even a suspicious result, patients are encouraged to get additional imaging and a biopsy to rule out cancer. When these tests don't find cancer, it is then called a "false positive."

"In the vast majority of women, this additional imaging rules out cancer," Henderson explained. "The higher risk of developing cancer among those with a false positive result with biopsy may be due to the fact that the radiologist sees an abnormal pattern that is not cancerous but is a radiographic marker associated with subsequent cancer."

Moreover, Henderson commented that these "false positives" should be tracked by doctors. She commented, "The false positive results should really be a piece of the puzzle in terms of trying to predict breast cancer risk. It needs to be used in conjunction with other risk factors."