Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vc8f6vVV 1018 days ago
> 1. Screening mammography has been proven to reduce cancer specific mortality in many studies.

So let's assume that an annual X-ray caused another cancer in women who would never develop breast cancer (i.e. 87% of them). You are saying "we don't know", but the authors of that paper are trying to answer exactly that. We may have saved lives in 13% group (that would be < 2.5% of those dying from breast cancer), but may have lost some lives in 87% group. According to the paper the net outcome is around 0.