Nearly 6,000 cases of invasive cancer detected by the NHS Breast Screening Programme in 2010 were those that would be too small to find by hand, according to figures from The NHS Information Centre.
In 2009/10 the programme in England detected 5,913 invasive cancers that were less than 15 mm across. This accounted for just 41.6% of all cancers detected by the programme in 2009/10 among women aged 45 and over. The percentage of small invasive cancers, as well as the total number of cancers detected, was slightly higher than the previous year.
