In the United States as a whole, breast cancer mortality rates have turned down to some extent in current years. That this is a recent trend is obvious from the fact that as long as the twenty years from 1970-1990, death rates demonstrated a small but considerable growth for white women of roughly 0.3 percent per year and a more considerable upsurge of 1.6 percent for black women.
In the United States, current view comes out to lend more weight to mammography screening and earlier diagnosis as the main cause for declining mortality rates, while in the UK and in Europe, where mortality rates have been declining more lately, the main present theories seem to good turn the wide usage of adjuvant tamoxifen as the cause. Because tamoxifen lowers mortality by nearly a third in long term studies of women with ER-positive breast cancers (approximately 75 percent of those diagnosed) this is surely a reasonable account.
Regular screening of women between the ages of 40 and 59 can considerably decrease breast cancer mortality in India, consistent with a study in the September 9 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.