Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tools for Stratifying Women into Risk Groups: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: The benefits and harms of breast screening may be better balanced through a risk-stratified approach. We conducted a systematic review assessing the accuracy of questionnaire-based risk assessment tools for this purpose. METHODS: Population: asymptomatic women aged ≥40 years; Intervention: questionnaire-based risk assessment tool (incorporating breast density and polygenic risk where available); Comparison: different tool applied to the same population; Primary outcome: breast cancer incidence; Scope: external validation studies identified from databases including Medline and Embase (period 1 January 2008-20 July 2021). We assessed calibration (goodness-of-fit) between expected and observed cancers and compared observed cancer rates by risk group. Risk of bias was assessed with PROBAST. No tool was consistently well-calibrated across multiple studies and breast density or polygenic risk scores did not improve calibration. Most tools identified a risk group with higher rates of observed cancers, but few tools identified lower-risk groups across different settings. All tools demonstrated a high risk of bias. CONCLUSION: Some risk tools can identify groups of women at higher or lower breast cancer risk, but this is highly dependent on the setting and population.