Breast cancer burden is high in low-resource countries. From 1980 to 2010, new breast
cancer cases increased by more than 50% worldwide.
1
Disease burden increased even more rapidly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs),
where more than half of breast cancer cases now occur. Moreover, breast cancer disproportionately
affects young women in LMICs, such that 23% of new breast cancer cases occur among
women age 15 to 49 years in LMICs versus 10% in high-income countries.
1
Breast cancer mortality is also higher in LMICs compared with high-income countries,
and reasons for this are multifactorial. One contributing factor is a lack of breast
cancer awareness and early detection in LMICs. For example, more than 90% of women
with newly diagnosed breast cancer in the United States have locoregional disease,
whereas more than half of women with newly diagnosed breast cancers in LMICs have
stage III or IV disease.
2,3
According to an analysis from the 2003 World Health Survey, only 2.2% of women age
40 to 69 years in LMICs had received any breast cancer screening.
4
In addition to insufficient early detection, other factors contributing to delayed
diagnosis include poverty, cultural and religious beliefs, misconceptions about the
disease, and fear of mastectomy.
5
Women's autonomy in health care decision making may also be limited in some cultures.
5
The WHO, along with many national cancer control programs, recommends population-based
screening mammography for detection of early-stage breast cancer in high-income countries,
even though there continues to be honest and sometimes heated debate regarding this
recommendation.
6–8
It is worthwhile to consider the possible benefits versus harms of breast cancer screening
in LMICs, which have received far less attention. In this commentary, we discuss breast
cancer screening and early detection in LMICs with a particular focus on Malawi. We
highlight areas of uncertainty and suggest pragmatic strategies for moving forward
in light of current evidence gaps.
Health care systems in LMICs may face strong incentives and pressure to adopt health
care interventions such as screening mammography that are well established in high-resource
settings, with implicit assumptions that benefits demonstrated in more developed countries
will generalize to less developed countries. Such assumptions are inherently problematic
and unrealistic in settings of severe resource scarcity. For example, there are compelling
reasons to believe that breast cancer screening would perform differently in LMICs
than in high-income countries. Factors that could reduce efficacy of breast cancer
screening in LMICs include a younger population with lower breast cancer incidence,
shorter life expectancy, more prevalent competing causes of death, and higher prevalence
of biologically aggressive subtypes for which patient outcomes are less likely to
be affected by screening. Conversely, breast cancer screening could have greater impact
in LMICs if it increases breast cancer awareness and early detection of symptomatic
disease. For example, there may be more diffuse effects than would be expected in
resource-rich settings where strong health care systems and higher levels of awareness
narrow the scope of breast cancer screening principally to detection of asymptomatic
disease. Indeed, for weak health care systems, it is plausible that effects beyond
breast cancer may be realized and may extend to cancer more generally or to women's
health. Investments in HIV programs have similarly had far-reaching effects beyond
providing antiretroviral therapy, and antiretroviral therapy clinics are now established
vehicles for effective delivery of many other essential health services. In Malawi,
commonly piggybacked health services in HIV clinics now include cervical cancer screening,
Kaposi sarcoma treatment, nutritional supplementation, and reproductive health and
mother-child wellness initiatives, all of which seek to maximize impacts from initial
investments for HIV.
Despite recent controversies about screening mammography in high-income countries
and a scarcity of high-quality data for this approach in LMICs, it is often assumed
that wherever mammography is available, it must benefit women. This may be the case,
even when screening is available only in the private sector without clearly defined
eligibility guidelines, quality control measures, or follow-up procedures.
9
Examples of this exist in Malawi, where a major intersection in Lilongwe (the capital)
features a billboard advertising screening mammography in a private clinic promoted
by a famous young Malawian breast-cancer survivor. However, the cost of a screening
mammogram in Lilongwe is approximately US$90 in a country with an annual gross domestic
product per capita of US$253.
10
Moreover, screening is often directly marketed to and used for women who can pay for
it, without clear eligibility criteria accounting for age, comorbidities, or projected
life expectancy. In Lilongwe, mammography sponsors have distributed coupons for discounted
screening mammography at public breast cancer awareness events to unselected audiences
of women primarily in their 20s and 30s. Benefits of screening mammography have not
been clearly demonstrated for average-risk women in these age groups anywhere in the
world, nor is it recommended for them in consensus guidelines.
In addition, LMICs often lack the necessary infrastructure to ensure high-quality
mammography and subsequent follow-up care.
11
Operating a mammography unit continuously requires a consistent supply of electricity
and x-ray films, as well as engineers, technicians, and radiologists, all of which
may be lacking in many LMICs. Four mammography units were donated to Malawi in 2012,
one to each tertiary referral hospital, with the intent to provide the first publicly
available mammography services in the country, but these units have yet to become
operational.
12
Mammography screening programs have also been estimated to cost US$16,000 to US$37,000
per life saved, which exceeds per capita health care budgets in many LMICs by a significant
margin.
9,13
International guidelines recommend clinical breast examination (CBE) as a preferred
approach to screening in settings in which mammography screening is not available.
5,14
Even in high-resource settings, there is some evidence that annual CBE might be as
effective as screening mammography in lowering breast cancer mortality.
15-18
Relative advantages for mammography versus CBE with respect to implementation are
detailed in Table 1.
Table 1
Relative Advantages of Mammography Versus Clinical Breast Examination as Screening
Approaches in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
In LMICs, two clinical trials in Egypt found that CBE conducted by physicians was
effective and cost-effective in rural and urban areas.
19,20
In Malaysia, training rural nurses to perform CBE resulted in significant breast cancer
downstaging (77% v 37% late-stage diagnoses).
21
In an ongoing cluster-randomized trial in India, CBE performed by female community
health care workers detected more early-stage (I to IIA) cancers (18.8 v 8.1 per 100,000
women) in intervention versus control villages; no differences were observed for stage
IIB and higher-stage cancers.
22
A cross-sectional study in Nepal comparing CBE performed by female community health
care workers with examinations by surgeons reported interobserver agreement of 64%
for lump detection, with 70% sensitivity and 95% specificity.
23
Moreover, modeling studies have suggested that CBE is cost-effective in low-resource
settings.
24,25
In addition to health care workers, lay volunteers can also be trained to perform
CBE. A study in rural Sudan screened approximately 10,000 women age 18 years or older
by using this approach. Seventeen of those screened had carcinoma in situ or breast
cancer, including eight with carcinoma in situ and four with early-stage breast cancer.
In control villages, only four women self-referred for breast symptoms, three of whom
had advanced-stage breast cancer.
26
In Tanzania, laypersons in villages were trained to provide screening for a variety
of cancers by using basic history and physical examination. After 3 years, breast
cancer downstaging was one of the most significant results of the program, evidenced
by a 74% increase in stage I to II breast tumors.
27
In LMICs where health care systems are significantly weakened by limited resources
and human capacity, it is worth emphasizing that anticipated impacts of widespread
breast cancer screening would not be limited to detecting asymptomatic disease. For
example, in Malawi, 47% of women with pathologically confirmed breast cancer at the
tertiary referral hospital in Lilongwe had symptom durations greater than 12 months,
28
and only 44% of randomly selected women from rural and urban areas in the Lilongwe
district were aware of breast cancer as a disease.
29
Therefore, if CBE were effectively scaled up throughout Malawi in a manner that engages
communities with effective downstream referral, anticipated benefits might be large
with respect to improved cancer awareness and earlier identification of unaddressed,
prevalent, symptomatic disease. In addition, there may be collateral effects on other
public health problems apart from breast cancer, including promotion of healthier
lifestyles among women as well as increased cancer awareness and destigmatization.
These off-target effects of breast cancer screening are no less important simply because
they are harder to define and measure than the number of early-stage breast cancers
diagnosed.
Classical cancer screening paradigms and messaging must be adapted to the LMIC context.
The HIV implementation science field now champions pragmatic scale-up of proven multicomponent
interventions to maximize population-level outcomes in LMICs. Similar approaches may
be attractive for cancer screening as well. We are currently conducting a pilot breast
cancer education and CBE screening intervention in Lilongwe among women attending
diverse health clinics. The major objectives are to assess uptake and feasibility
of packaging CBE with other health services, performance characteristics of CBE performed
by trained lay breast health promoters, and completion rates for referrals among women
with detected abnormalities. These preliminary data will help inform wider scale-up
of breast cancer awareness and screening efforts throughout Malawi.
Even as the screening mammography debate evolves in resource-rich settings, mammography
is being actively promoted and implemented in many resource-limited countries in the
world, including Malawi. We believe there is agreement within the global health community
that high breast cancer burden and mortality in LMICs require an urgent response,
but competing health needs and local realities require that available resources be
optimally used to provide the best value for populations overall. This may be particularly
true, given that several breast cancer screening approaches are available that can
be packaged together in varying combinations. We believe more evidence is needed to
guide large-scale breast cancer screening approaches in LMICs under varying socioeconomic
and cultural conditions, and we emphasize that although CBE has been shown to result
in cancer downstaging in LMIC settings, effects on breast cancer–specific mortality
remain unclear. Limited cancer diagnosis, treatment, and registration throughout LMICs
also limit the impact of screening interventions as well as metrics for their evaluation
and must be simultaneously strengthened. We eagerly await results of ongoing studies,
including our own work, to define optimal approaches in Malawi, with the expectation
that successful strategies here may be quite different from those in other LMIC settings.