And despite the US National Cancer Institute's recent decision to no longer officially recommend annual mammograms for women aged 40 to 49, Dr. Mark Homer said he would continue to do so.

Speaking at Hamilton Rotarians' weekly lunch, the Bermuda-born chief of Mammography at New England Medical Centre said breast cancer had grown increasingly common in women.

When he started out as a doctor a decade ago, studies showed a one in 13 incidence of breast cancer in women, he noted.

Now one in nine women, with an increased chance for women over age 70, will get the disease, he said, and "no one has the slightest clue why ...'' A major US study involving the screening of 275,000 women with breast cancer, found that 80 percent had no evident risk factors for the disease, he said.

"We are kidding ourselves if we think we can sit down with a patient, get their medical history and then determine if they are at risk,'' he said.

Dr. Homer said just being female topped his list of breast cancer risk factors. Other factors that increase risk include age, already having had the disease, and last, a family history of it -- especially pre-menopausal breast cancer.

The good news, Dr. Homer said, was that mammograms detected 90 percent of all breast cancers involving lumps as small as two fifths of an inch.

Lumps that size were generally too small to have spread to lymph nodes and other parts of the body. He added there was a 98 percent detection chance if a women also underwent regular physical breast exams.

Dr. Homer said the US National Cancer Institute's controversial stance not to come out with a recommendation that women aged 40 to 49 should have annual mammograms was "one of the greatest tragedies''.

"We need to find breast cancers when women are young and healthy and the lumps are small,'' he said.

The Institute's recently announced decision was made after coming to terms with health care costs and a mass of confusing studies on the disease, he said.

Dr. Homer pointed out the irony of the position was that its head, Dr. Samuel Broder, had stated that as a Government official he had to say "let's save money'', but as a private doctor, he would continue to advise women over 40 to get mammograms annually.

Dr. Homer said he believed America was rich enough to fund annual mammograms for women aged 40 and up.

While breast cancer was the most common cancer in women under age 55, and the second most common cancer in women over age 55 (lung cancer being the first), eight out of nine women will never get it. He also pointed out that women with lumps who go into hospital for breast biopsies had an 80 percent chance of it being benign -- non-cancerous.

Dr. Homer is King Edward VII Memorial Hospital's visiting breast cancer specialist and trained Bermuda's radiologists.

Dr. Marc Homer.