What happens when a woman gets a false positive mammogram? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you are a woman who’s had a mammogram to screen for breast cancer, you may be reluctant to come back again for regular screening if you’ve gotten a positive result that turned out to be false. That’s the conclusion of a recent study described by William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins.

Nelson: There were 345,000 or so false positives, in other words the mammogram said I see something suspicious and the women were recommended to undergo further imaging, to come back sooner than the screening interval, or to have a biopsy. When they went ahead and underwent this second procedure they could tell that it was a false positive. They're going to be false positives. There are more false positives in younger women because after menopause the breast ducts receded a little bit and the mammogram performs better.     :31

Nelson says the ability of mammography to detect early breast cancers, when they are most easily treated, is proven. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.