Benign Breast Disease — The Risks of Communicating Risk

The term “risk” appears in the title of more than 10,000 medical articles published in 2004 (2 percent of the total) — nine times as many as appeared in 1975. In this issue of the Journal, the article by Hartmann et al. on benign breast disease and the risk of breast cancer1 continues the trend, as does this editorial. Hartmann et al. studied a cohort of women who had a benign breast lesion and found that the histologic appearance of the initial biopsy specimen was associated with the risk of breast cancer. As compared with women in the general population, . . .