Quality assurance, health care Archives - Revista Brasileira de Ginecologia e Obstetrícia

PURPOSE: to check epidemiological data from a breast diagnostic clinic. METHODS: mammographies from 35,041 patients were studied, within a period of 2 years and 7 months, from 2004 to 2006, 32,049 (91.5%) of them from screening, and 2,992 from symptomatic patients (8.5%). The calculated parameters were: detection rate of the screening patients, percentage of cancer among the symptomatic patients, rate of biopsy indication, percentage of minimal, in situ, and stage 0-1 carcinomas, recall rate, and predictive value of mammographies considered as abnormal and of biopsies' indications in screening patients. RESULTS: 228 diagnoses of breast cancer were made, 111 in screening patients (0.34% detection rate) and 117 in symptomatic patients (3.91% detection rate). The number of biopsies' recommendations among screening patients was 544 (1.7% of those patients). There were 28% of minimal carcinomas, 10% of in situ carcinomas and 93% of stage 0-1 carcinomas among the screening patients. Recall rate was 19%. Positivity of mammographies considered as abnormal (VPP1) was 1.65%. The rate of biopsies' positivity (VPP2) was 21.9%. CONCLUSIONS: this study brings important epidemiological data for the audit of mammographic screening, rare among us. Data have been analyzed as compared to what is recommended by the literature, the detection rate and the percentage of minimal and in situ carcinomas found being comparable to the established values, but with the VPP value lower than the ideal.