RESPONSE: Re: Decreasing Women’s Anxieties After Abnormal Mammograms: A Controlled Trial

Extract

Dr. Kopans suggests that immediate reading of mammograms is fraught with problems and that “double reading of mammograms is not feasible when immediate mammogram interpretations are provided.” We strongly disagree that this combination is not feasible because exactly this combination is routinely carried out in our clinical setting and took place during our study, as we described in our article ( 1 ) . Our patients therefore were not deprived of the benefits he describes for double reading.

We agree with Dr. Kopans that education of women is important—so much so that we designed an educational intervention to do exactly that and studied its effects on women’s anxiety because we feel that it is important to determine if well-meaning, well-designed educational efforts are effective rather than just assuming that they are. Unfortunately, the educational intervention was not associated with decreased anxiety among women with false-positive mammograms ( 1 ) . Meanwhile, we found that immediate reading of mammograms did decrease anxiety ( 1 ) .