PhD defence L. M. (Lindy) Kregting

Below is a brief summary of the dissertation:

One in seven women will get breast cancer in their live. This makes it the most common cancer among women in the Netherlands. To raise awareness for this disease, October has been appointed breast cancer awareness month. It is no coincidence that my defence takes place during this month. 
One of the interventions we have to limit the impact of breast cancer is the national breast cancer screening programme. This programme is very effective in reducing breast cancer mortality and increasing quality of life among breast cancer patients, but also involves some harms. Therefor it is important to keep the right balance in benefits and harms.
In my thesis, I investigated the effectiveness of the current breast cancer screening programme and that of possible changes to the programme together with the perspectives of the women who it concerns. We found that the current programme prevents 1300 breast cancer deaths per year, however the balance in benefits, harms and costs might be improved when introducing a screening programme which invites women once every three years (instead of two), but starts at a younger age. Other findings from this thesis are 1) that it is important to use relevant quality of life data based on the perspectives of the women themselves, 2) information leaflets should be made attractive to read, include information about the effects of participation in multiple screening rounds, and include personalised information about the risks of women who previously had a false positive test result, and 3) the programme needs continuous evaluation to ensure the programme remains to balance the benefits and harms in a changing time, context and with new innovations.