Older women are urged to have a mammogram every year to check for early signs of breast cancer-but it’s bad advice. Instead, health authorities should be recommending screening every two years or so; the women would have all the same benefits without the health scares of false-positives, where the mammogram detects a cancer that isn’t actually there.
The suggested new guidelines come from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco who studied the health of around 140,000 women aged between 66 and 89. There were no benefits for women who were screened every year, the researchers found, and the rate of cancers, diabetes and heart disease were similar among all the women, including those screened less frequently.
But there was a big difference in the rate of false-positives. Nearly half of all the women who had annual mammograms had a false-positive reading-which involved further tests, biopsies or even invasive treatment-compared to around 29 per cent of those screened every other year.
(Source: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2013; doi: 10.1093/jnci/djs645).
