Word: breast
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...little benefit that women may not consider the screening worth the trouble. An accompanying editorial took the findings even further. Declared Dr. John Bailar III, a physician and medical statistician at McGill University in Montreal: "The evidence . . . does not demonstrate any clear health benefit from mammographic screening for breast cancer in women younger than 50 years . . . Routine screening of this age group should be discontinued...
...have yearly mammograms for ten years, only 22 lives would be saved. The overall price tag would be considerable. Screening even a quarter of the 14 million women in the U.S. between 40 and 49 would cost $350 million. The practical result: few poor women are tested for breast cancer at all; middle-class women, too, balk at the cost, which many health-insurance plans still refuse to reimburse (though four states require insurers to cover at least some routine screenings...
...with later mammograms, and then every year or two * between 40 and 49. But several other professional groups, including the American College of Physicians, have long chosen not to recommend screening by X rays for women under 50 except for those considered at high risk: women who have had breast cancer already or whose mothers or sisters have had the disease...
...result has been confusion about the value of mammograms among both doctors and their women patients. Janet Gay Hamby of Thousand Oaks, Calif., was 44 and the mother of two teenagers when she discovered a lump in her breast two years ago. Two mammograms suggested that it was malignant, and when a biopsy confirmed the diagnosis, Hamby underwent surgery and radiation treatments. Because cancer cells had invaded a lymph node, six months of grueling chemotherapy followed. She knows that the chance of a recurrence will remain high for about another year. Says Hamby: "My prognosis is good, but it would...
...self-examination and regular physical exams can save lives in women over 50; X-ray screening can cut the death rate in this group by 30%. But the benefits of mammography for younger women are less clear. One reason is that younger women have a lower incidence of breast cancer than older women, so there is simply less cancer to detect. In addition, young breast tissue is denser and more likely to conceal tumors from X rays than the more fatty tissue of older women...