The influential British Medical Journal (BMJ) reported Sept. 6 that diagnostic mammograms can actually raise the chances of getting breast cancer, especially among women with well-known gene mutations like BRCA1 and 2. This is only the latest affirmation of the threat to breasts caused by X-rays — or “mammography” as the entrenched cancer industry so warmly calls them. About 180,000 women a year are told they have breast cancer in the United States.
    Independent scientists and health journals have maintained for decades that mammograms do far more harm than good. In his 1995 book “Preventing Breast Cancer” he late Dr. John Gofman says, “75 percent of breast cancers are caused by radiation, primarily medical X-rays.” And the magazine Alternative Medicine said editorially in 2001: “Their ionizing radiation can mutate cells, and the mechanical pressure can spread cells that are already malignant (as can biopsies).”
    According to Anouk Pijpe of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, one of the BMJ study’s authors, “We believe countries who use mammograms in women under 30 should reconsider their guidelines. It may be possible to reduce the risk of breast cancer in (high risk) women by using MRIs [magnetic resonance imaging scans], so we believe physicians and patients should consider that,” the Detroit News reported.
    Unlike mammography, MRIs do not involve radiation. The Detroit News reported that in Britain, the Netherlands and Spain, doctors now advise women under 30 with BRCA mutations to get MRIs instead of X-rays. Another method of early breast cancer detection that avoids ionizing radiation is DII, Digital Infrared Imaging or “breast thermography.”*
    The new study also concludes that a mammogram’s radiation exposure, and other tests that expose the chest to radiation — like abdominal X-rays, CT scans and PET scans  “might be especially harmful to them and an MRI is probably a safer method of screening women under 30 who are at high risk because of gene mutations,” the Detroit News said. In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now claims that fully one-half of the average citizen’s external radiation exposure is due to the radioactive medical procedures.
    The new study European scientists followed 2,000 women older than 18 with one of the gene mutations in Britain, France and the Netherlands. The gene mutations of concern are known as BRCA1 and BRCA2.  The BMJ study found that women with a history of chest radiation in their 20s had a 43 percent increased relative risk of breast cancer compared to women who had no chest radiation at that age. “Any exposure before age 20 seemed to raise the risk by 62 percent,” the Detroit News said.
    “There is general agreement that women under 40 should not” have breast X-rays, said Peter Gotzsch, author of a 2001 Danish study. “Mammography screening has been held up to the public and politicians with two claims. One, that it saves lives. That is very doubtful. The second claim is that this will lead to less radical surgery, and it doesn’t,” Danish researcher Peter C. Gotzsch told the Chicago Tribune. Gotzsch is director of the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen.
    The BMJ study affirms long-standing skepticism and warnings by critics of what is seen as the medical industry’s misuse and over-use of radiation.
    2010: The study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that breast X-rays may have almost nothing to do with the recent reduction in breast cancer death rates. Mette Kalager, the lead author, a breast surgeon at Oslo University and a visiting scientist at Harvard, said “We were surprised.” The study suggests that “increased awareness and improved treatments,” not X-rays of the breast, are the main reason for the reduced breast cancer mortality.
    2008: Canadian researchers find that fewer doses of so-called anti-cancer radiation treatments, three weeks of daily exposures rather than five to seven weeks, “work just as well.” In “Shorter Radiation for Cancer of the Breast,” the New York Times reported that cancer doctors are reportedly working to “make the treatment safer” by trying to avoid or at least minimize exposing the patients’ heart and lungs to the X radiation. Such exposures have been linked to coronary artery disease and to scarring, irritation and even cancer of the lungs.
    2002: An independent group of experts says there was insufficient evidence that mammograms prevent breast cancer deaths. The panel agreed with Danish scientists who found that five of seven large studies of mammography had serious flaws and could not be relied upon to recommend the “screenings.”
    2001: Danish scientists Peter Gotzsch and Ole Olsen of the Nordic Cochrane Center, reported Oct. 20 in the influential British medical journal The Lancet that there is no reliable evidence that mammograms save or prolong women’s lives.
    2000: The Journal of the National Cancer Institute reported in Sept. that researchers found — after studying 40,000 Canadian women for 13 years — that an annual mammogram was no more effective in preventing deaths from breast cancer than periodic physical exams for women in their 50s.
    1995: The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that there is no evidence that breast X-ray exams significantly reduce breast cancer deaths among women in their 40s. In 1993, the National Cancer Institute stopped endorsing mammograms for women in their 40s.
    1994: The Food and Drug Administration established for the first time mandatory minimum requirements for the delivery of mammography in the U.S., but the advocacy group Public Citizen said the rules didn’t have enough teeth. It had found improperly trained doctors, out-of-date equipment and doses of X radiation up to 30 percent above the permitted maximum.
    1992: The Canadian National Breast Cancer Screening Study found that women in their 40s who received annual mammograms were up to 50% more likely to die of breast cancer than those who had only physical exams. The researchers suggested that the squeezing of the breast in the X-ray machine could “force cancer cells from tiny tumors into the bloodstream speeding their spread.”
    1991: Radiation from mammograms can significantly raise the risk of breast cancer in women who carry the ataxia-telangiectasia, or AT, gene, the New England Journal of Medicine reported. Michael Swift, the lead researcher told the Associated Press, that the amount of radiation that appeared to trigger this cancer   in gene carriers was “appallingly low.” At the time over 1 million U.S. women carried the AT gene, and Swift said between 5000 and 10,000 cases of breast cancer could be prevented by avoiding the X-ray tests.
    As Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, has said, “We need to change the focus and start looking at how to prevent it.”
    *For more information about avoiding medical pressure with radiation-free thermography, see the website <alternativemedicine.com> click on “Search Health Conditions,” and enter “breast cancer AND thermography.”

-- John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin. For a footnoted version of this article write <nukewatch1@lakeland.ws>