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...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 of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in a statement. "They do not set federal policy, and they don't determine what services are covered by the Federal Government...
...after taking a more in-depth look at the numbers, the task force decided that the risks of mammography for women in their 40s do not outweigh the small benefit that the screens provide. On top of that, the panel recommended that doctors no longer urge women to perform monthly breast self-exams at home, citing a lack of scientific evidence to support that they save lives...
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...
...exhaustive was the task force's deliberation? How definitive are its guidelines? And which set of recommendations should women follow...
...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 anxiety and unnecessary biopsies, tests and doctor's visits...