New mammography guidelines call for starting later and screening less often

Women can wait until age 45 to start getting annual mammograms and cut back to every other year once they turn 55, according to new breast cancer screening guidelines from the American Cancer Society. The recommendations, published in yesterday’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, are a major shift from the organization’s previous guidelines, which advised women to get annual mammograms starting at age 40. They are intended for women with an average risk of breast cancer, meaning no family history of breast cancer or prior radiation treatment to the chest. These changes reflect accumulating data showing that for women younger than 45, the harms of mammography screening likely outweigh the benefits, according to Dr. Nancy Keating, professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School who coauthored an editorial discussing the new guidelines. Making sense of the new guidelines “For an average-risk woman in her early 40s, the risk of breast cancer is less than one in 100, or about 0.7%,” says Dr. Keating. That’s a lot lower than most women believe, partly because many women have heard the statistic that one in eight women will get breast cancer. But that statistic is a lifetime risk and applies only to 85-year-old women. Women also tend to overestimate the benefits of mammography. We’re told that mammography saves lives. In fact, mammography only reduces the relative risk of dying by about 20% overall, and by just 15% for women...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Breast Cancer Tests and procedures Women's Health mammogram mammography Source Type: news