screening. In the presence of stable or increasing incidence trends, better treatment is the obvious candidate of this success story. Its synergistic effect with screening has been modeled under different assumptions, taking into account that screening can reduce the rate of death from breast cancer only when followed by treatment (5). Not only is mammography screening likely to have detected breast cancers at earlier stages, allowing the adoption of less harmful and more effective treatments, but also the presence of an organized screening program may have promoted the provision of more effective care by monitoring the treatment quality of screen-detected cancers and by favoring the creation of multidisciplinary units of breast cancer specialists (6). Efforts to disentangle the effects of organized screening, early diagnosis, and treatment based on descriptive population data are therefore unlikely to be a reliable exercise, also because screening itself is intrinsically part of clinical practice (7). In our opinion, it is time to move beyond an apparently never-ending debate (8–10) about the extent to which screening for breast cancer in the 1970s to 1990s has reduced mortality from breast cancer—as if it was isolated from the rest of health care. The current scenario is completely different from the past: asymptomatic patients with screen-detected breast cancers represent a large proportion of the breast cancer patients in developed countries. Current priorities should be to increase the accuracy of breast cancer screening and the appropriateness and availability of treatment, to improve communication, and to advance research. In the European Union, member states have been encouraged (11) to extend breast cancer screening programs to the entire target population, to monitor the quality of the screening process, and to link screening, diagnosis, and treatment in a comprehensive framework of quality-assured health care. Recognition of the merits and limitations of breast cancer screening, as well as of its clinical management, should help design more mature and evidence-based communication with the public and with individuals. In terms of research, the identification of indolent cancers that may be candidates for no or less aggressive treatment, the recognition of clues on how to safely reduce the intensity of screening in low-risk women, and the development of more accurate screening technology would be important steps forward that would be likely to have a large impact on future practice. These improvements would allow lowering the harms, in primis overdiagnosis and overtreatment, and increasing the benefits