{"id":61,"date":"2006-12-11T12:04:23","date_gmt":"2006-12-11T11:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/resource.bmj.com\/bmj\/2006\/12\/11\/lancet-9-dec-2006\/"},"modified":"2006-12-11T12:04:23","modified_gmt":"2006-12-11T11:04:23","slug":"lancet-9-dec-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2006\/12\/11\/lancet-9-dec-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Lancet 9 Dec 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is still plenty of room for debate about the usefulness of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140673606698346\/fulltext\">screening mammography<\/a> over the age of 50, but after this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140673606698346\/fulltext\">study<\/a>, I hope we will hear no more about lowering the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140673606698346\/fulltext\">starting age to 40<\/a>. In 55,000 British women aged 39-41 who were randomised to receive it, it failed to show a significant effect on breast cancer mortality after ten years.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In the heyday of the Mad Cow panic, a professor of microbiology from Leeds prophesied that hundreds of thousands would die from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140673606698358\/fulltext\">variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease<\/a>, and we don\u2019t yet know for certain that he is wrong, since it has an incubation period of up to 50 years. However, a moderate degree of complacency seems in order, since rates are falling rather than rising, and it remains about as common as getting struck dead by lightning. The accompanying <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140673606698176\/fulltext\">editorial <\/a>summarises the situation. It\u2019s certainly a bit disquieting that there is the possibility of an undetectable and untreatable infectious agent lurking in one or two <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelancet.com\/journals\/lancet\/article\/PIIS0140673606698176\/fulltext\">bags of blood<\/a> somewhere in the UK: but it seems to me that the risk from receiving a transfusion is about the same as taking a short walk in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is still plenty of room for debate about the usefulness of screening mammography over the age of 50, but after this study, I hope we will hear no more about lowering the starting age to 40. In 55,000 British women aged 39-41 who were randomised to receive it, it failed to show a significant [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2006\/12\/11\/lancet-9-dec-2006\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-richard-lehmans-weekly-review-of-medical-journals"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/files\/2017\/02\/richard-lehman.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}