New mammogram guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federal advisory board, recommended against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years, even though mammography screening reduced breast cancer rates by 15% in women ages 39 to 49.
The new guidelines went so far as to recommend that women no longer conduct self examinations.
Breast cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States. About 192,370 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,170 women will die of the disease in 2009, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. Government statistics estimate that 1.44 percent of women who are now 40 years old will get breast cancer over the next 10 years.
According the recommendation:
The harms resulting from screening for breast cancer include psychological harms, unnecessary imaging tests and biopsies in women without cancer, and inconvenience due to false-positive screening results. Furthermore, one must also consider the harms associated with treatment of cancer that would not become clinically apparent during a woman’s lifetime (overdiagnosis), as well as the harms of unnecessary earlier treatment of breast cancer that would have become clinically apparent but would not have shortened a woman’s life. Radiation exposure (from radiologic tests), although a minor concern, is also a consideration.
The new guidelines are being criticized by groups such as the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology, not to mention hundreds and hundreds of outraged women who are survivors of breast cancer.
This is clearly the direction that the Obama administration wants to take America with future healthcare services. Cutting back on critical diagnostic tools that has proven to have saved thousands and thousands of lives to save money is only the tip of the iceberg in future rationing of healthcare under government controlled medical services.
