A new study demonstrates that breast cancer screening every two years beginning at age 40 “has the potential to reduce the number of women who die of breast cancer while minimizing the harms.” The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health reported on the study.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force, who made updates to their recommendations for screening, had since 2009 recommended that “women in their 40s make an individual decision about when to start screening based on their health history and preferences, being sure to start no later than age 50, and ending at age 74.” Mammography technology has improved since then, detecting cancer at higher rates, coinciding with higher breast cancer incidence in younger people.
The researchers involved with the study “evaluated 36 screening strategies with data from national cancer registries, breast cancer clinical trials and the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium.” These different strategies were then “ranked by their benefits, such as breast cancer deaths averted and life years gained, and risks of false positive recalls, benign biopsies and over-diagnosis.”
In addition, "the decision analysis teams were able to provide estimates to the US Preventive Services Task Force on the potential effects of different mammography screening strategies on the higher breast cancer death rate in Black women compared to all U.S. women” for the first time. The decision analysis also showed that “women with dense breasts, higher breast cancer risk and lower levels of other chronic diseases are estimated to experience greater breast cancer deaths averted and more life-years gained from mammography screening compared to women with lower density and cancer risk and higher levels of chronic diseases that limited health and life expectancy.”
