Mammography is used to detect breast cancer at an early stage, but screening can also lead to overdiagnosis.
This means that a cancerous tumour is detected even though it grows so slowly that it would never have caused symptoms or made the woman ill.
According to forskning.no and Dagens.no, previous studies have produced widely varying estimates of how often this occurs.
However, a new international study led by Danish researchers and published in medRxiv suggests that overdiagnosis may be less common than some previous estimates have indicated.
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More personalised screening
Researchers are also investigating whether screening could be tailored more closely to each woman's individual risk in the future.
The Personalised Mammography Screening study is examining, among other things, whether different risk factors can be used to determine how often women should be screened.
The idea is that women at higher risk could be screened more frequently, while women at lower risk could have longer intervals between screenings. One of the factors researchers are looking at is breast tissue density.
Breast tissue matters
Breast size is not the determining factor. According to the Norwegian Cancer Society, high breast tissue density can increase the risk of breast cancer.
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Forskning.no has previously reported on research showing that women with very dense glandular tissue have a higher risk than women whose breasts contain more fatty tissue.
Breast density cannot be seen or felt, but it can be assessed on mammogram images.
At the same time, dense tissue can make cancerous tumours more difficult to detect because both dense breast tissue and cancer can appear light on the images.
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This article is made and published by Ida-Marie Palm Varbæk, who may have used AI in the preparation.