Scarce information about breast cancer screening: An Italian websites analysis

Although the public should have complete and correct information about risk/benefit ratio of breast cancer screening, public knowledge appears generally scarce and oriented to overestimate benefits, with little awareness of possible disadvantages of the screening. We evaluated any document specifically addressed to the general female public and posted on internet by Italian public health services. The presence of false positive, false positive after biopsy, false negative, interval cancer, overdiagnosis, lead-time bias, exposure to irradiation, and mortality reduction was analyzed. Of the 255 websites consulted, 136 (53.3%) had sites addressed to the female public. The most commonly reported information points were the false-positive (30.8% of sites) and radiation exposure (29.4%) rates. Only 11 documents mentioned overdiagnosis, 2 mentioned risk of false positive with biopsy, and only 1 mentioned lead-time bias. Moreover, only 15 sites (11.0%) reported quantitative data for any risk variables. Most documents about breast cancer screening published on the web for the female public contained little or no information about risk/benefit ratio and were biased in favor of screening.