Breast Cancer: Mammography Recommendations Updated -- April 30, 2024

Locator: 47099BREASTCANCER.

Task force updates guidance for breast cancer screenings for women and older (until age 74. Link here. 

These new recommendations, published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA, replace the task force’s 2016 recommendations. Some groups, such as the American Cancer Society, have already recommended for women to start mammograms in their 40s.

Unless I missed it, there is very little (or no) discussion of current mortality rates, or how mortality rates have changed over time.

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Breast Cancer

Previously posted.

Locator: 46916CANCER.

This might be the best link from Radiology, published February 9, 2021. Very, very concerning.

The data years: The authors conducted a retrospective analysis of (a) female breast cancer mortality rates from NCHS data for 1969–2017 for all...

Results: 

• between 1989 and 2010, breast cancer mortality rates decreased by 1.5%–3.4% per year for each age decade from 20 to 79 years...
• after 2010, breast cancer mortality rates continued to decline by 1.2%–2.2% per year in women in each age decade from 40 to 79 years but stopped declining in women younger than 40 years.
  

The chart at the top of the page at this link has an anomalous data point, undated (?) but most recent data is through calendar year 2020 which suggests same data base as the Radiology link above.  

If I'm reading the chart correctly:

An observation: for all the billions spent on research, the observed death rate in the past ten years, 2009 - 2019, not encouraging. Yes, the drop from 22.2 to 19.4 looks great statistically but to the individual patient, no change in observed death rate in the past ten years

Comment: like everything else in human endeavor, I assume there's a lot of "group think" in research labs around the world. One wonders if some out-of-the-box thinking might be indicated. And perhaps there has been; I certainly don't know. I don't follow breast cancer except for occasionally looking at the statistics. But these statistics are depressing. Maybe I'm being too negative.

Comment: we won't know until 2024 or 2025 but the statistics will be very, very interesting for the calendar years 2020 and 2021 when Covid interrupted outpatient visits when early diagnosis might have been made and for many cancer therapy might have been interrupted. Again, the best study, the Radiology study covered breast cancer data from 1969 to 2017, well before 2021 - 2023.

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Prostate Cancer

Link here.

 Again, typographical errors and content errors likely. If this is important to you, go to the source.