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Breast cancer

Updated screening guidelines — much ado about small improvements

The recently updated breast cancer screening guidelines from the American Cancer Society are less aggressive than previous versions and clearer about overdiagnosis. However, a lack of attention was placed on the differences in effect estimates between trials at high and low risk of bias, and the authors failed to quantify the most serious harm.

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Correspondence to Karsten Juhl Jørgensen.

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Jørgensen, K., Gøtzsche, P. Updated screening guidelines — much ado about small improvements. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 13, 139–140 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2015.232

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