ArticleAnnals of family medicine
Diagnostic invasiveness and psychosocial consequences of false-positive mammography.
Article in Annals of family medicine. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Recent advancements in lung cancer research: a narrative review.Translational lung cancer research · 2025Review
- The mammography debate, round two: science, smoke and mirrors.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2015Article
- Waiting time and the psychosocial consequences of false-positive mammography: cohort study.Journal of negative results in biomedicine · 2015Article
- In This Issue: A Cry for Balance.Annals of family medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeWe undertook a study to assess whether women with false-positive mammography have worse psychosocial consequences if managed with a workup that involves a biopsy (invasive group) than if managed with only additional imaging (noninvasive group).
methodsWe performed subgroup analysis of a cohort study of 454 women with abnormal screening mammography and 908 matched control women with normal results. Using a condition-specific questionnaire (Consequences of Screening in Breast Cancer), we assessed 12 psychosocial consequences at 5 time points (0, 1, 6, 18, and 36 months after final diagnosis) and compared the 2 groups of women with false-positives (invasive and noninvasive management groups).
resultsAmong the 252 women with false-positive mammography eligible for this study, psychosocial consequences were similar for those managed invasively and those managed noninvasively during the 36 months of follow-up. In 60 comparisons (12 scales and 5 time points), differences between the groups were never statistically significant (P <.01) and the point estimates for the differences were always close to zero. The psychosocial consequences of women with false-positive results, regardless of management, fell between those of women with normal mammography and those of women determined to have breast cancer.
conclusionsWe found no evidence that use of more invasive diagnostics was associated with worse psychosocial consequences. It is therefore reasonable to pool subgroups of women with false-positives in a single analysis. The invasiveness of subsequent diagnostic procedures does not help to identify women at higher risk for adverse psychosocial consequences of false-positive mammography.
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