Recently the United States Preventative Services Task Force made some new recommendations regarding the screening for breast cancer. The new recommendations say that woman 50 and older should receive a mammogram every 2 years, which is a change from the old recommendation of every year for woman 40 and older. In addition they now recommendation that self-examination should no longer be educated. The reasoning is that "there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits. "
I am no doctor, so my thoughts have little weight, but these new recommendations sound awful. From what I can gather, these recommendations are based on the idea that the associated risk of these procedures outweighs the potential benefits. But the only risk I know of that comes with a mammogram or self-examination is a false positive. There's no real detrimental health side-effect going on. You just find out that you actually don't have a deathly disease. So maybe there's a few weeks of anxiety, at worst the woman just decides to lop them off.
Since I first saw the posting, there's been an update which says that woman between 40 and 49 may warrant mammogram studies based upon family history and some other factors. Essentially it's a case-by-case basis.
But I'm not convinced even the old recommendations were good enough. My Mom got breast cancer in her early thirties with no family history. In fact, when she got it she was the first on either side of the family to have cancer and some members of the family put the blame on her. Anyway the first time Mom got it, it was diagnosed by a physical examination during a routine checkup. She then had some x-rays taken but they didn't show anything (remember this was early 90s). Wanting a second opinion she went to a different doctor who said the x-rays are worthless and he performed some sort of needle test on her. That confirmed it. Then a few years later, now we're probably in her early forties, her yearly mammogram found the beginnings of some new tumor growth. At this point she decided to just get rid of them. This was because the first round of treatments was quite awful for her. She blames the chemotherapy on memory loss, and the rest of her treatments on a permanent soreness in her right arm. Even today, almost 20 years later, we aren't supposed to touch Mom's right side. Although she has noticed that recently some of her lost memories will bubble up out of the blue. She can remember more events from her childhood.
So my point is that Mom got breast cancer twice, with no previously known family history or dispositions to it. And it was diagnosed by the very procedures, physical examination and mammograms, that the doctors are recommending against. Before she got cancer she was the definition of health. Probably the worst thing she consumed was coffee with 'Sweet and Low' (saccharin was the sweetener back then). If these doctors who made these new recommendations had been around back then, I could very well have a dead Mom. Alright there's always an exception to the rule, and maybe my Mom was that exception, but if the risk involved is simply a false positive I just simply cannot understand their reasoning that a false positive which at worst leads to surfboard outweighs the benefit of a positive reading which definitely leads to death. To me that sounds like a 15 year old. "Us doctors feel that you'd be better off dying than having to go through life without your breasts."
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