HEALTH RADAR'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NATURAL HEALING by Nick Tate

HEALTH RADAR'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NATURAL HEALING by Nick Tate

Author:Nick Tate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HEA016000 Health & Fitness / Naturopathy, HEA020000 Health & Fitness / Reference, REF010000 Reference / Encyclopedias
Publisher: Humanix Books


Changing Guidelines on Mammograms Raise More Questions than Answers

In a major shift in policy, the ACS now recommends that most women get annual mammograms starting at age forty-five rather than at age forty, and that those who are fifty-five and older scale back screening to every other year.

The new guidelines, issued in late 2015 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are nearly in line with guidelines from the USPSTF, the government-backed expert panel that recommends biennial breast cancer screening starting at age fifty for most women.

Both sets of guidelines were based on studies suggesting the benefits of detecting cancers earlier did not outweigh the risk of false-positive results, which needlessly expose women to additional testing, including a possible biopsy.

When the USPSTF first recommended pushing back mammogram screening from forty to age fifty, many advocacy groups, including the ACS, decried the change, claiming it would lead to more women dying from breast cancer.

New guidelines from the USPSTF note that some women in their forties might benefit from screening and that decisions should be made on an individual basis and discussions between a woman and her doctor.

But the changing guidelines have left many women confused, health experts say. What’s more, some women’s health specialists believe the new ACS recommendations could cost some women their lives.

“Since the 1990s, annual breast cancer screening is the only thing that has been proven to decrease breast cancer rates,” says Dr. Kathleen A. Ward, a medical director of breast imaging at the Loyola University School of Medicine. “I think it is likely that this decision is economically motivated and comes from a desire to cut health care costs, but there are other places that we could be doing that.”



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