A study in the Sept. 18 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggests that interpretation of mammograms varies according to a radiologist’s age and years in the field. Younger, more recently trained radiologists had two to four times the number of false-positive mammogram readings than radiologists who graduated more than 15 years prior to the study.
Joann Elmore, associate professor of medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, led a team of researchers who examined results from 24 radiologists’ interpretations of 8,734 screening mammograms from 2,169 women over an eight-and-a-half year period. Elmore and her colleagues at the UW and Harborview Medical Center found wide variation in how frequently different radiologists noted masses, calcifications, and other suspicious lesions.
Patients who were younger, premenopausal, using hormone replacement therapy at the time of the mammogram, had a family history of breast cancer, or had had a previous biopsy were more likely to have a false-positive result. Women who had mammograms in the 1990s were also more likely to have false-positive results than women who had mammograms in the 1980s. The authors suggest that the increase of false-positives in the 1990s may be related to an increased fear of malpractice litigation.
September 27, 2002