Johan Nilsson: Therefore, breast screening is a good idea

When Lena Nyström was 65, she missed an appointment for a mammogram, she tells DN. Later it turned out that she had again suffered from breast cancer. In both breasts, to top it all off.

Lena Nyström is not alone. Every year around 8,000 Swedish women are affected by breast cancer, which makes it the most common form of cancer among women. The disease is serious. Each year around 1,300 women die from their cancer. In addition, a diagnosis almost always means great physical and psychological suffering. On the other hand. Ten years after the diagnosis, almost nine out of ten sufferers are still alive. Despite the seriousness, the race is not over, far from it. Today, Lena Nyström, who turned 76 years old, has been declared healthy.

One reason for the good survival figures is that a large part of the breast cancer that affects Swedish women is detected early. Because just like with any other cancer, the motto "the earlier, the better" applies. One way to find breast cancer early is with the help of mammography, an X-ray examination of the breasts. Today, all Swedish women aged 40 to 74 are offered mammography every 18 to 24 months.

However, calling hundreds of thousands of women for regular mammography is a very large and resource-demanding device. A legitimate question is therefore whether the screening program provides enough "bang for the buck" to make it worthwhile. Not only in terms of resources, but also personally. The women who choose to participate have a right to expect that they have something to gain from letting an X-ray machine gradually flatten their breasts, and that they are not doing it unnecessarily, including the anxiety that every cancer screening brings.

The benefit of the screening program has been widely debated. In an evaluation from 2022, however, the National Board of Health and Welfare stated that the screening program reduces mortality from breast cancer by 16 percent in the age group 40 to 49 years, and by just over 20 percent in the older age groups. One in five deaths, in other words.

And in a study from 2025, researchers at the Karolinska Institute showed that women who skip their first mammography examination are often less likely to participate in future examinations. These women do not run a greater risk of developing cancer than others, but if they do, they have a clearly increased risk of dying from their disease. The study also showed that a whopping 32 percent of all women who were called to their first screening chose not to.