Missed breast cancer diagnoses rare at one-stop clinics

MedWire News: Missed breast cancer diagnoses are very rare among UK women discharged from one-stop breast clinics, reassuring study findings indicate.

In the UK, women with breast concerns have the option of attending clinics with multidisciplinary teams offering “triple assessment” of a clinical breast examination, mammography and/or ultrasound imaging, and where necessary, needle biopsy, explain Dr Peter Britton (Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK) and team.

To determine how often breast tumours are missed at these clinics, the researchers reviewed data on 7004 patients who were discharged after initial assessment between 2001 and 2003.

Over the next 3 years, 29 of these women were subsequently diagnosed with breast cancer.

The researchers note that subsequent breast cancer diagnoses were most common in women aged 40–49 years, who “present the greatest imaging and diagnostic challenge”.

Of the women with a subsequent breast cancer, 10 women experienced no delay in diagnosis, and seven experienced probable delay. A possible delay occurred in three of the patients and a definite delay in diagnosis, or missed diagnosis, occurred in nine.

Overall, there was a missed cancer rate of 1.7 cases per 1000 women discharged, indicating that triple assessment at the one-stop clinics was 99.6% accurate at diagnosing breast cancer.

“We have shown that triple assessment carried out in a multidisciplinary teams setting is extremely safe,” Britton and team comment.

They conclude: “The data from this audit can reassure both clinicians and patients that one-stop breast clinics provide high-quality diagnostic accuracy, with very few missed cancers, and contribute to early breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.”

The research is published in the British Journal of Cancer.