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Cancer doctors are also worried that insurance companies will use the panel's new recommendations as an excuse to stop paying for mammography in younger women. Since 2002, when most professional organizations urged annual mammograms for women between 40 and 49 years old, the breast-cancer mortality rate in that group has steadily dropped, by about 3% a year, owing in large part to enhanced screening; doctors were able to pick up and treat cases of disease earlier...
...task force's second data set comes from computer-modeled predictions of breast-cancer incidence and death rates based on various screening scenarios. The models were run by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), who compiled data from six cancer centers around the country, and plugged it into 20 separate age- and time-based screening protocols - from screening women ages 49 to 69 every year and every two years, for example, to screening only women ages 60 to 69 every year and every two years as well. By switching from annual to biennial exams, these women would maintain...
Overall, the analysis suggests that mammography reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer 15% among women 39 to 49 years old. But the task force determined that while mammograms certainly reduced risk of death, that reduction was small in this age group in light of the risks associated with the screening. In order to save one life among 40- to 49-year-olds, doctors would have to perform yearly mammograms in 1,904 women over 10 years. Among older women, between ages 50 and 74, one death could be prevented for every 1,339 women screened for 10 years...
...clear yet how the task force's recommendations will impact the decisions that women and their physicians will make about mammography in coming years, but already doctors are fearing the worst. "We could erode the progress we made in reducing breast-cancer mortality over the past decade or so because now the breast cancers are going to be larger when we find them, and more likely to be at a more advanced stage," says Dr. Therese Bevers, professor of clinical cancer prevention at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. She adds, "Even including the risk or harms of screening...
...wade through the confusing information and options presented to them. So, says Dr. George Sledge, president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and a professor of medicine at Indiana University's Simon Cancer Center, it's worth remembering that "the core issue is that screening mammography reduces breast-cancer mortality. And that is unchanged by this report...