Word: tasks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's the hard lesson that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) learned when it changed course on its recommendations for mammography screening and advised women to delay having the screen until they are 50, rather than beginning evaluations at 40, as they have recommended previously. Over the past two decades, annual mammograms for women over 40 had become a standard of preventive care in the U.S. - right up there with daily exercise, quitting smoking and getting a flu shot. (Read "Understanding the Health-Care Debate: Your Indispensable Guide...
...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...