Filed at 8:00 p.m. ET

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) -- The World Health Organization has concluded that mammograms can prevent breast cancer deaths in one in 500 women aged 50 to 69.

The findings released Tuesday, the latest word in a debate over whether mammograms save lives, were being hailed as definitive.

The report, produced by 24 independent experts for the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an agency of the WHO, said many of the doubts raised recently were unsubstantiated.

World breast cancer experts are meeting this week in Barcelona for the European Breast Cancer Conference and plan to devote Tuesday to discussing the mammogram controversy.

Recommendations that women have regular mammograms have been based on seven landmark studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s that concluded d mammograms can cut deaths from breast cancer significantly.

However, confidence in breast screening has been hit by damning conclusions reached last fall by scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen. They reanalyzed the seven landmark trials and concluded that five of them were so flawed that it was not possible to tell if routine mammograms save lives.

Since the Danish research, several other expert panels, including the WHO group, have taken a fresh look at the old studies to see if the findings were indeed flawed. They have each concluded that mammograms save lives, although their opinions vary as to by how much regular mammograms reduce the chance of breast cancer death.

``This is the definitive answer,'' said Julietta Patnick, who coordinates Britain's national breast cancer screening program.

The WHO group found there was sufficient evidence in the old trials that death rates for women aged 50 to 69 can be reduced by 35 percent if they have regular mammograms. They said that many of the criticisms that the Danes had of the old trials were unfounded.

``What we can say to women is if you go and take up the offer of the screening and are screened regularly then the risk of dying of breast cancer goes down by 35 percent,'' said the group's chairman, Bruce Armstrong of the International Agency for Research on Cancer. ``That's the promise we can make to women.''

There was only limited evidence of reduction for women aged between 40 and 49, the WHO evaluation found.

^----

On the Net:

International Agency for Research on Cancer

http://www.iarc.fr