A New Approach To The Regularity Of Mammography

A New Approach To The Regularity Of Mammography.
A rejuvenated description challenges the 2009 recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force that women between 40 and 49 who are not at inebriated risk of breast cancer can probably wait to get a mammogram until 50, and even then only penury the exam every two years. A well-known Harvard Medical School radiologist, chirography in the July issue of Radiology, says telling women to wait until 50 is penthouse out wrong. The task force recommendations, he says, are based on faulty sphere and should be revised or withdrawn.

So "We know from the scientific studies that screening saves a lot of lives, and it saves lives surrounded by women in their 40s," said Dr Daniel B Kopans, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and chief radiologist in the breast imaging division at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) said its recommendation, which sparked a firestorm of controversy, was based in field and would protect many women each year from superfluous worry and treatment.

But the guidelines left most women confused. The American Cancer Society continued to approve annual mammograms for women in their 40s, and young breast cancer survivors shared substantial stories about how screening saved their lives. One main stew with the guidelines is that the USPSTF relied on incorrect methods of analyzing data from breast cancer studies, Kopans said.

The jeopardy of breast cancer starts rising gradually during the 40s, 50s and gets higher still during the 60s, he said. But the information used by the USPSTF lumped women between 40 and 49 into one group, and women between 50 and 59 in another group, and identified those in the younger league were much less likely to develop breast cancer than those in the older group.

That may be true, he said, except that assigning epoch 50 as the "right" age for mammography is arbitrary, Kopans said. "A trouble and strife who is 49 is similar biologically to a woman who is 51," Kopans said. "Breast cancer doesn't trace your age. There is nothing that changes abruptly at age 50".

Other problems with the USPSTF guidelines, Kopans said, subsume the following. The guidelines cite research that shows mammograms are top for a 15 percent reduction in mortality. That's an underestimate. Other studies show screening women in their 40s can depreciate deaths by as much as 44 percent. Sparing women from unnecessary hector over false positives is a poor reason for not screening, since dying of breast cancer is a far worse fate. "They made the idiosyncratic decision that women in their 40s couldn't tolerate the anxiety of being called back because of a shady screening study, even though when you ask women who've been through it, most are pleased there was nothing wrong, and studies show they will come back for their next screening even more religiously," Kopans said. "The duty force took the decision away from women. It's incredibly paternalistic". The business force recommendation to screen only high-risk women in their 40s will need the 75 percent of breast cancers that occur among women who would not be considered intoxication risk, that is, they don't have a strong family history of the disease and they don't have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes known to reinforce cancer risk.