[Usefulness of the "targeted" clinical examination in the screening of breast tumors].

The authors report the findings from over 10,000 mammographic exams performed on female patients from 1980 to 1989. The results demonstrated that, even though mammography is still the only instrumental method available for mass screening of breast cancer, the role of clinical examination should not be underestimated. If adopted for patients with positive nodes and dense breasts, clinical examination can dramatically reduce the number of false negative cases. Biopsies required on the grounds of clinical examination only, i.e. when no malignant lesions had been detected at mammography, led to the identification of 21 breast carcinomas, a figure almost equal to the number of cases (23) detected by mammography in the absence of suspect clinical signs.