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LONDON - WOMEN who examine their breasts themselves for cancerous lumps do not necessarily reduce their chances of dying from the disease, according to a new study.
In fact, researchers said the practice may be causing more harm than good. Women who think that they have found lumps choose to have biopsies more often than necessary.
These conclusions were based on a review of two studies of more than 380,000 women in Russia and China conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organisation that evaluates medical research.
The women were divided into two groups. One group was taught how to perform self-examinations of their breasts and instructed to do them regularly; the other was not.
Those who did extensive breast examinations ended up getting 3,406 biopsies done, while women who did not had only 1,856 biopsies, the Guardian reported.
Among the 587 participants who died of breast cancer during the course of the studies, 292 women had dutifully performed breast self-examinations and 295 had not - a small difference that suggests there is no benefit from self-checks.
The review's co-author, Dr Jan Peter Kosters, said: 'At present, screening by breast self-examination or physical examination (by a trained health worker) cannot be recommended.'
Prescriptive 'breast self-examination'', which suggests that women should rigidly check their breasts in a particular way at a particular time, is widely practised in the United States but it requires training to learn the complicated routine.
It has been largely discredited for many years in Britain as it was found to be unhelpful and discouraging.
Instead, British women aged between 50 and 70 are routinely called for mammogram screens every year where an X-ray is taken of the breast tissue to detect cancerous lumps. Research has suggested the programme saves 1,400 lives a year.
The British health department also advises women to simply be vigilant to unusual changes in their breasts, the Guardian said.
'We call it TLC - touch, look and check,' Ms Sarah Cant of the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer told the BBC.
'Being breast aware does not mean following a fancy routine, you just need to know what your breasts look and feel like normally...Most of the 44,000 cases of breast cancer diagnosed each year in Britain are detected by women themselves,' she said.
The Cochrane report cited studies suggesting that women who self-examine had a biopsy done of every benign lump in the breast.
Thus, they often emerged with scars, breast deformities and emotional wounds.
The report's co-author, Dr Peter Gotzsche, director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark, said that biopsies were often the first step on the path towards further testing and increasingly invasive diagnostic tests.
A benchmark study from 1998, published in the Journal of Public Health Medicine, showed that five months after a benign surgical biopsy, 61 per cent of women still struggled with symptoms of anxiety and psychological distress.
These included trouble sleeping, changes in appetite and a general malaise fuelled by thoughts of breast cancer, Time magazine reported.
Independent breast cancer expert Hazel Thornton said the findings suggested general practitioners send their worried patients for biopsies as a precautionary measure.
'The result is they suffer more anxiety because they have more biopsies,' she told the Guardian.
The study, however, does not suggest that women should not perform the examinations themselves or have medical professionals perform them.
But the authors wrote 'that the lack of supporting evidence from the two major studies should be discussed with these women to enable them to make an informed decision'.
They added that women should always 'seek medical advice if they detect any change in their breasts that might be breast cancer'.
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