Locals react with dismay to new breast cancer screening guidelines w/ new cancer screening recommendations and American Cancer Society response

By Emily Younker

eyounker@joplinglobe.com

When breast cancer survivor Sharon Clark learned of a government panel’s new recommendations about some common breast cancer screening methods, she was appalled and almost unbelieving.

“Oh my God, that just blows my mind,” she said.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a multi-disciplinary government panel, released new recommendations earlier this month regarding mammography and other breast cancer screening practices for women older than 40 who do not face an increased risk of the disease.

The task force recommended against routine screening mammographies for women ages 40 to 49, for which it said the “net benefit is small.”

The panel also recommended that biennial mammography screening begin at age 50. And, it came out against teaching breast self-examination, for which it said there is “moderate or high certainty” that it “has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits.”

“Age should have nothing to do with the mammogram — period,” Clark said. “Even teenagers should start their breast self-exam because we all know cancer doesn’t care how old you are.”

Clark, 52, was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33 after discovering a lump while doing a self-exam.

“Probably over half the people I personally know who’ve been affected by breast cancer, they’ve discovered the lump from a self-exam,” she said. “I can’t imagine, if I hadn’t done my breast self-exam, it would have been nine months before (a scheduled checkup), and I’d hate to think of where I’d be.”

Better balance

The task force concluded in a report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that biennial screenings are more efficient than annual screenings, and provide a better balance of benefits and harms.

“Slow-growing tumors are much more common than fast-growing tumors, and the ratio of slow- to fast-growing tumors increases with age, so that little survival benefit is lost between screening every year versus every other year,” the task force wrote. “For the small subset of women with aggressive, fast-growing tumors, even annual screening is not likely to confer a survival advantage.”

The reason for suggesting that women wait until age 50 for a mammogram, the task force said, is that early and frequent mammograms are often more harmful — leading to unnecessary tests and biopsies — than beneficial.

The recommendations are meant to give women the information they need to avoid breast cancer while minimizing the harms of mammography, said task force member Dr. Michael LeFevre, a professor and associate chairman of the family and community medicine department of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine.