Including the method of detection for breast cancer in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database is long overdue.

Debates about breast cancer screening have continued in part because the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database, which began in 1974, has never included the method of detection so that it has been impossible to determine the role that early detection has played in the major decline in deaths from breast cancer that we have seen in the US since 1990. Method of detection should be added to the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database as soon as possible.