IT'S ABOUT COSMETICS, NOT HEALTH:

Regular mammogram screening for breast cancer might be causing "widespread overdiagnosis," with some women treated for tumors that would not have caused sickness or death, a new study contends.

Doctors tend to find more small tumors and precancerous lesions in areas where more mammograms take place, researchers found after analyzing county-level data collected by U.S. health officials.

However, the death rate from breast cancer did not appear to drop in the face of increased mammogram rates in those areas, wrote the researchers from Harvard University and Dartmouth.

"The simplest explanation is widespread overdiagnosis, which increases the incidence of small cancers without changing mortality," the authors argue in the July 6 issue of the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

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