No reduction in death rate is seen with bilateral mastectomy, US study finds

Increasing numbers of US women with breast cancer are opting for double mastectomies, but the procedure is not associated with a lower 10 year mortality than breast conserving surgery with radiation, a study has found.

The study was reported in the 3 September issue of JAMA.1 Allison W Kurian, of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, and colleagues, accessed data that had been collected from 1998 to 2011 on 189 734 women who had new diagnoses of early, unilateral breast cancer at stages 0-III. The data came from …