adminIn a move sure to befuddle women — and anger some breast cancer survivors — the American Cancer Society this week issued new guidelines saying less screening for breast cancer is better than more.
The venerated cancer organisation says women should start getting mammograms at 45 instead of 40, and that everyone can skip the routine manual breast checks by doctors.
An exhaustive review of the medical literature shows these measures just aren’t very effective, according to the group.
“The chance that you’re going to find a cancer and save a life is actually very small,” said Dr Otis Brawley, the society’s chief medical officer.
Earlier testing is not necessarily better. The problem with mammograms is that they have a relatively high false positive rate, which means women sometimes have to undergo painful and time-consuming tests only to find out they never had cancer in the first place.
The chances of false positives are especially high for women under 45, as they have denser breasts and tumours are harder to spot on an image.
“If she starts screening at age 40, she increases the risk that she’ll need a breast cancer biopsy that turns out with the doctor saying ‘You don’t have cancer, so sorry we put you through all this,’” Brawley said.
He said he knows women who’ve had false positives year after year.
“False positives are a huge deal,” he said. “These women are so frightened and inconvenienced they swear off mammography for the rest of their lives.”
A Canadian study looked at 44 925 women who were screened for breast cancer, and 106 of them fell into this category and were treated for breast cancer “unnecessarily,” according to a review in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The new guidelines are meant for women at average risk of breast cancer. The society says women with a family history or who carry a gene that predisposes them to breast cancer may need to start screening earlier and more frequently. — CNN
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