An Open Letter to Patients Regarding Mammography Guidelines
Queen of Peace Hospital urges women over 40 to continue to receive yearly screening mammograms, as recommended by the American Cancer Society and American College of Radiology.
Learn more about mammography at Queen of Peace Hospital and the Women's Health Center.
As you may know, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a federally supported body, recently released mammography recommendations that would advise against routine screening mammography in women age 40-49, against clinical and self breast exams, against screening for women 75 years or older, and against yearly screening in women between the ages of 50 and 74.
If these recommendations are adopted as policy, two decades of decline in breast cancer mortality could be reversed. These recommendations ignore valid scientific data and place a great many women at risk of dying unnecessarily from a disease that we have made significant headway against over the past 20 years. Mammography is not a perfect test, but it has unquestionably been shown to save lives, especially in women aged 40-49. Since the onset of regUlar mammography screening in 1990, the mortality rate from breast cancer, which had been unchanged for the preceding 50 years, has decreased by 30 percent. At least 40 percent of the patient years of life saved by mammographic screening are of women aged 40-49 (1 in 69 women in this age group will be diagnosed with breast cancer).
The USPSTF claims that the "harms" of mammography, including discomfort of the exam, anxiety over positive results, and the possibility of over treatment because we cannot distinguish which cancers will become deadly most quickly- outweigh the greatly decreased number of deaths each year resulting from breast cancer screening. Without a doubt, the possibility of having one's life saved through early detection far outweighs any of these concerns.
I am deeply concerned about the recommendations of this committee in severely limiting screening for breast cancer. This is dangerous and puts the lives of our patients and loved ones at significant risk. I strongly urge physicians to continue to encourage yearly screening mammograms for patients over 40 as the American Cancer Society and American College of Radiology continue to recommend.
Mary Hestness, M.D.
Medical Director, Department of Radiology