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One of the reasons why you must carefully consider the decision to have a mammogram is due to their high rate of false positives. A false positive occurs when a mammogram suggests a woman has cancer when none actually exists.

In the US, the risk of having a false-positive test over 10 mammograms is a concerning 58 percent to 77 percent! When a woman is told she may have breast cancer, it causes considerable anxiety and psychological distress. Meanwhile, you will be subjected to more testing, such as biopsy or surgery, which carry their own set of risks, unnecessarily.

Now, new research has found, however, that women who have received a false-positive diagnosis via mammography may be more likely to develop breast cancer years later, although no one is quite sure why.

Does Getting a False Positive on a Mammogram Mean You’re More Likely to Develop Breast Cancer Later On?

Out of 58,000 Danish women who had had a mammogram, more than 4,700 were found to have false positives (the false-positive test rate in Denmark is about 16 percent — much lower than it is in the US). About 1.5 percent of those turned out to be false-negatives, meaning that the doctors missed the cancer the first time around.

However, even after taking these false-negatives into account, women with false-positive mammograms were still 27 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer years later. As for what this means for women, no one really knows, but the researchers suggested their results favor some “biological susceptibility” as an explanation.

They suggested further research to determine the true excess risk of false positives, and future studies should definitely look into

all of their related risks  like the increases in stress levels, unnecessary biopsy, and perhaps additional mammograms, which all have the potential to impact breast cancer risk.