Is Screening for Breast Cancer Important?

There is a lot of debate around whether or not breast health screening is necessary. New data now suggest that the screening of breast cancer may not need to be as frequent as possible. Early screening may now not be as helpful as once suggested. This is because there has been the widespread use of excellent adjuvant therapy for those who have cancer.

Adjuvant therapy is therapy similar to raloxifene and Tamoxifen that prevent cancer growth after the tumor is removed. For estrogen and progesterone positive tumors, these adjuvant therapies have saved countless lives in women whose cancer hasn’t been completely removed during surgery.

Women have been receiving more timely care in the treatment of breast cancer, which has made screening less important. Many experts, however, still aren’t in agreement.

Most experts are still going with the previous screening methods, which include screening mammograms at the age of 40 for the average woman and sooner than that for women who have a strong family history or who have genetic evidence for having gene positive signs.

One woman believes her screening mammogram saved her life. She developed breast cancer at the age of 53 and had no family history of breast cancer. She was shocked and frightened when the mammogram returned with positive results for cancer. Fortunately the cancer was caught in time and she was able to survive. She suggests the mammogram saved her life. Her doctors recommended annual mammograms for all women over the age of 40.

Current recommendations from the US Preventative Services Task Force are that women over the age of 50 receive annual mammograms. It is thought that this reduces the risk of dying from cancer of the breast by 15 to 23 percent. New research indicates that mammograms only reduce the risk of dying from breast cancer by 10 percent.

In the latest research, a study involving more than 40,000 females over the age of 50, it was found that using mammograms to detect the presence of breast cancer only saved the lives directly of a third of women who actually survived the cancer. Follow up time was only about two years, which is felt by many investigators to be too short of a time. Something in the range of 7 to 10 years was felt to be more likely to really tell if mammograms really are beneficial in saving lives at all.