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Study - Breast cancer screening guidelines from ACS are better

01/30/2011 15:42:00 admin
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Study says women should follow the ACS guideline

The U.S. Preventative Service Task Force (USPSTF) recommends women should have breast cancer screened from 50 to 74, while the American Cancer Society (ACS) advises from 40 to 84.

Which one should be chosen?  Scientists now say the latter is the better.

Researchers from the universities of Colorado and Michigan conducted a study to analyze the same data looked at by the USPSTF and the ACS, and then compared the results.

The results showed that women who begin yearly mammograms at age 40 would have 40 percent reduction of breast cancer deaths, while women beginning at 50 only had 23 percent reduction.

Beginning at 40 would increase the chance of living as much as 71 percent more than beginning at 50.

“Task Force guidelines have created confusion among women, leading some to forego mammography altogether. Mammography is one of the few screening tools that has been proven to save lives and our analysis shows that for maximum survival, annual screening beginning at 40 is best,” says Helvie, professor of radiology at the U-M Medical School.

The harm resulting from screening for breast cancer include psychological harm, unnecessary imaging tests and biopsies in women without cancer, and inconvenience due to false-positive screening results, according to the guideline of the USPSTF.

Specifically, the USPSTF says the false-positive results are more common for women aged 40-49.
However, the researchers found that if women aged 40-49 checked annually, they will have a false-positive mammogram once every 10 years and will be asked back for more tests once every 12 years.

“The task force overemphasized potential harms of screening mammography, while ignoring the proven statistically significant benefit of annual screening mammography starting at age 40,” Hendrick says.

 “In addition, the panel ignored more recent data from screening programs in Sweden and Canada showing that 40 percent of breast cancer deaths are averted in women who get regular screening mammography. Our modeling results agree completely with these screening program results in terms of the large number of women lives saved by regular screening mammography.”

202,964 women in the United States were diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,598 died from the disease in 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And the American Cancer Society says 209,060 new cases will be found this year and 40,230 will die from it.

Stephen Lau and editing by Denise Reynolds
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