Word: cancerous
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Immediately, almost every major cancer organization and physicians' group - including the American Cancer Society, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the American College of Ostetricians and Gynecologists - questioned the new recommendations. So did women. "I'm just shocked, absolutely shocked," says Deana Rich, a clinical-research associate in Seattle. The 47-year-old has no family history of breast cancer but has been dutifully getting an annual mammogram for the past seven years in order to reduce her risk of dying from the disease. One of her friends recently received a breast-cancer diagnosis, and several other friends...
That is the biggest worry boiling up among doctors and women across the country - that a procedure that undeniably reduces the risk of breast cancer is no longer being recommended for millions of women. Another worry: will insurance begin denying coverage of breast-cancer screens in women under 50 who want them? The Obama Administration quickly disputed that notion, as well as the suggestion that the panel's advisory was a government strategy to cut costs by rationing health care. "The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside, independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations," said Secretary...
Indeed, the mammogram is one of doctors' most powerful tools against breast cancer. There is a robust body of clinical-trial evidence showing that routine screening reduces breast-cancer deaths; the task force attests to that as well. But while everybody, to varying extent, agrees that mammograms are beneficial, what's less clear is the age at which routine mammography screening should begin. That depends in part on breast cancer risk, which increases with age - for every 100,000 women, the risk of developing breast cancer is 1 in 69 in women in their 40s, 1 in 38 in women...
Consensus on this question would be helpful because professional cancer organizations, cancer hospitals and doctors base their screening guidelines on the advice of nationally recognized groups - like the American Cancer Society and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (or NCCN, a coalition of National Cancer Institute-designated hospitals), and the USPSTF. Neither the ACS nor the NCCN intends to modify its guidelines for yearly breast-cancer screening in all healthy women over...
...USPSTF, a volunteer group of 16 health professionals, is often considered to issue the most conservative recommendations compared with other national groups. In 2002, for instance, it called for breast-cancer screening every one or two years for women ages 40 to 49, while other guidelines advocated yearly tests. For its updated 2009 recommendations, the USPSTF analyzed clinical trials on the benefits of mammography - much of that same research was also evaluated for the task force's 2002 decision - while folding in new data on the risks and harms of screening. Those risks include false positive results, over-diagnosis, patient...