U.K. screening program saves 5,000 lives annually.

2004 AUG 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- The success of Britain's national screening program for cervical cancer, introduced in 1988, was highlighted in an epidemiologic study in the July 17, 2004, issue of the Lancet.

Authors of the study outlined how the program has prevented an epidemic of cervical cancer: Around 5,000 deaths are prevented every year, and 100,000 (1 in 80) of the 8 million British women born between 1951 and 1970 will be saved from premature death by the cervical screening program.

Recent reports have suggested that the reduction in deaths achieved by the U.K. national cervical screening program is too small to justify its costs, except perhaps in a few high-risk women.

Julian Peto, of Cancer Research UK, and colleagues analyzed trends in deaths from cervical cancer before 1988 to estimate what future trends in cervical cancer deaths would have been if national screening had not been introduced.

They reported that cervical cancer deaths in England and Wales among women younger than 35 years rose three-fold from 1967 to 1987, largely as a result of increases in the transmission of human papillomavirus (HPV) associated with the acquisition of sexually transmitted diseases.

By 1988, incidence in this age-range was among the highest in the world. Since national screening was started, however, this rising trend has been reversed, the authors found.

"Cervical screening has prevented an epidemic that would have killed about 1 in 65 of all British women born since 1950 and culminated in about 6,000 deaths per year in ...