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Comment on 'Addition of ultrasound to mammography in the case of dense breast tissue: systematic review and meta-analysis'

British Journal of Cancer volume 119, page 1443 (2018)Cite this article

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Sir,

We read with great interest the recent meta- analysis written by Rebolj and colleagues,1 which assessed the effect of supplementary ultrasound to mammography in screening women with dense breast tissue on the detection of breast cancer. The authors concluded that supplementary ultrasound screening would be beneficial to increase the sensitivity of breast cancer detection. We appreciate the authors’ thorough analysis, which is a clinically valuable study. However, we have some concerns about the strength of their conclusion owing to some important limitations of the findings in this review.

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References

  1. Rebolj, M., Assi, V., Brentnall, A., Parmar, D. & Duffy, S. W. Addition of ultrasound to mammography in the case of dense breast tissue: systematic review and meta-analysis. Br. J. Cancer. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-018-0080-3 (2018).

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  2. Higgins, J. & Green, S. (eds) Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.1.0. (The Cochrane Collaboration, 2017). http://handbook.cochrane.org.

  3. Schmid, C. H., Stark, P. C., Berlin, J. A., Landais, P. & Lau, J. Meta-regression detected associations between heterogeneous treatment effects and study-level, but not patient-level, factors. J. Clin. Epidemiol. 57, 683–697 (2004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology, Zigong Fourth People’s Hospital, Zigong, Sichuan, China

    Min Zhu & Bin Lu

  2. Department of Anesthesiology and Translation Neuroscience Center, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

    Ming Li

  3. Department of Anesthesiology, Chengdu Second People’s Hospital, Chengdu, Sichuan, China

    Jia Liu

Authors
  1. Min Zhu
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  2. Ming Li
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  3. Jia Liu
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  4. Bin Lu
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Correspondence to Bin Lu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Zhu, M., Li, M., Liu, J. et al. Comment on 'Addition of ultrasound to mammography in the case of dense breast tissue: systematic review and meta-analysis'. Br J Cancer 119, 1443 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-018-0237-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-018-0237-0

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