Breast cancer screening programme: experience from Eastern province, Saudi Arabia.

Programmes for early diagnosis of breast cancer are lacking in most countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region. This paper reviews a nongovernmental screening programme launched in October 2009 in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, in which 14 health centres were covered by 2 mobile mammography machines. Annual screening was offered to all women aged 40 years and above. Up to February 2014 a total of 8061 women were screened, an uptake rate of 15.0%. The recall rate was 7.9%. The number of cancers detected was 47, a cancer detection rate of 5.83 per 1000 women screened; 70.2% of the cancers detected had either no mass or the lesions were smaller than 2 cm. The mean age of women with cancer was 50.4 (SD 7.6) years. The screening parameters of our study correlated well with international standards. Despite the controversies regarding universal breast cancer screening, a national breast cancer screening programme for Saudi Arabia is needed.