Dubai: The Sharjah Breast Cancer Centre has been able to detect some breast cancer cases in early stages in the 1,000 mammogram screenings it offered to women for free during the breast cancer month in October, an official of the Ministry of Health and Prevention said on Thursday. Dr Mona Al Sebelgy, consultant family medince doctor and coordinator of the breast cancer screening programme spoke to Gulf News on the sidelines of a symposium organised for breast surgeons, histopathologists, radiotherapists and radiologists to commemorate the 25th anniversary of breast cancer screening by the Ministry.
Dr Al Sebelgy said “We at the breast cancer centre have the state of the art breast cancer screening and radiologists and also invited renowned Swedish mammogram specialist Dr Laszlo Tabar. Dr Tabar is the professor of radiology and medical director of the department of mammography from the University of Sweden, who has run the most successful and longest study on the topic, to examine these mammograms. We are not yet ready to reveal the number of women detected with breast cancer as complete reports are yet awaited, but feel these mammograms will provide a timely intervention for these women.
Dr Tabar who gave a detailed presentation on the history and approaches to breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in his talk gave empirical evidence that early detection of breast cancer played the most important role in arresting the progression of the disease. He told Gulf News: “While the average age for breast cancer screening in the world is 50 years, in Asia and the Middle East, where there is a high incidence I would advise women to go in for preventive screening from the age of 35. That is because breast cancer is a progressive disease and if detected in stage I or II can be checked and treatment can prolong the life of the woman by 15- 25 years at least. There are chances that it can completely arrest the growth of the tumour and early intervention also means that 25 years later the patient is likely to die of some other reasons and not breast cancer.”
He quoted results from a 30-year study he conducted on 2,468 women in the age group of 40-74 years in the W-E counties of Sweden the results of which were published in the Lancet journal. The results indicated a 30 per cent drop in mortality rates for women who were diagnosed earlier.
He added that the ‘sojourn time’ of a tumour which is its journey from stage I to stage II and later was considerably long and early intervention could help eliminate the tumour in its first stage saving the life of the women. He said: “While we need high resolution mammograms and competent radiologists to detect breast cancer, the new device is the market is the Auto Assist Breast Ultrasound (ABUS) which can help detect a tumour in very dense tissue that can be missed in normal screening. I am urging the ministry to acquire this and its likely with this technology the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer will become even more effective.”
