A negative mammographic and US finding of a palpable abnormality does not exclude breast cancer, but the likelihood of breast cancer is low, approximately 2.6%-2.7%. It may be higher if the breast tissues are dense and lower if they are predominantly fatty.

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BACKGROUND While the question of whether the trials of breast cancer screening have resulted in a reduction in breast cancer death has been the subject of much scrutiny, there has been less attention to the reduction in tumor size achieved by screening. METHODS Size data for invasive breast tumors were assembled from a variety of sources. The health consequences that can be expected from finding tumors of various sizes were determined using a recently developed mathematical method for relating tumor size to death rate. RESULTS First, in both the Swedish two‐country trial and at the MGH Breast Imaging Division, the sizes of the invasive breast cancers in the screening population (those masses seen at screening together with those found as palpable masses after screening examinations) were sufficiently smaller than the cancers found among women who had not used screening to have lead to considerable reductions in death. Second, the lack of reduction in death rates detected in both Canadian National Breast Screening Studies could be ascribed to the small reductions in tumor size achieved in these studies. Third, radiographic density had a small effect, whereas age had a negligible effect, on the capacity of mammographic screening to find breast carcinomas at smaller, and thus less lethal, sizes. CONCLUSIONS Prompt attendance at annual mammographic screening offers the potential to reduce tumor size and, presumably, breast carcinoma death, in women of all ages and density groups. Cancer 2003. © 2003 American Cancer Society.

A new method has been developed that can be used to estimate tumor growth rate from information on the numbers and sizes of breast cancers found at screening. With use of this method and information available for the tumors seen over the last decade at the Breast Imaging Division at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), it appears that the median doubling time for invasive breast cancer is approximately 130 days. From this doubling time value, together with information on the sizes at which breast cancers become detectable on clinical grounds and by screening, it appears that the mean and median sojourn times for invasive breast cancers in the MGH population are approximately 1.7 and 1.3 years, respectively.

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