There is considerable underscreening for breast cancer in women in the Republic, a leading cancer specialist has said.
Dr John Kennedy, consultant medical oncologist and breast cancer specialist at St James's Hospital, told an international cancer conference in Dublin yesterday "there are lots of people who could be screened for breast cancer who are not being screened".
He was referring to the limitations of the national breast screening programme, BreastCheck, which is limited both geographically and in age range. At present, only women aged 50-64 are called to screening by the programme which is also confined to the east and midlands.
Dr Kennedy told the meeting at the Institute for Molecular Medicine that a multidisciplinary approach to breast cancer has "a very significant impact on the disease".
There was a 50 per cent reduction in death from breast cancer for women who were appropriately treated with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. "Twenty-four per cent of women receive all three modalities of treatment in St James's Hospital compared with a figure of 4 per cent nationally."
Criticising the slow progress of the State's cervical screening programme, Dr Mairead Griffin, consultant histopathologist/cytopathologist at St James's Hospital said a national roll-out of cervical cancer screening was limited by insufficient capacity in cytology laboratories here.
The programme, which is confined to 67,000 women in the Mid-Western Health Board, is also hampered by the lack of a national population register and the need to introduce new technology for greater accuracy in assessing cervical smears, she said.