Breast Screening Solution Helps You Plan Your Mammography
There are four different sets of guidelines for when you should start getting mammograms and how often you need them, and they do not agree with each other. A tool called Breast Screening Solutions can help low-risk women determine which schedule is best.
Deciding on a mammogram is tricky because more women will get false positives (claiming they have cancer when they actually don’t) than who are accurate. This can lead to additional tests, such as a biopsy. Meanwhile, some women will be diagnosed with a “overdiagnosed” real cancer that will never be fatal, leading to unnecessary chemotherapy or surgery * . (A recent long-term study published in BMJ found that 22% of breast cancers fall into this category.) On the other hand, skipping mammograms means you won’t be able to detect cancer early.
Many groups, including the US Preventive Services Task Force , say the best approach is to talk to your doctor about what is right for you. The Breast Screening Solution Tool will help you figure out where to start your discussion. You answer a few questions about your risk (how many of your relatives have had breast cancer? How old did you have your first child?) And it helps you figure out some things to consider.
For example, it provides a visual representation of your false positive and false negative results, as in the screenshot above. It also compares your chance of dying from breast cancer versus other conditions at different screening schedules.
At the end of the process, he asks your thoughts on statements such as “I’m willing to do anything to detect breast cancer as early as possible” and “I only want to have a mammogram if I have a high risk of breast cancer.” He then gives you a printed summary of all the information the tool has given you, tailored to your risk.
The only thing that bothers me is that it doesn’t answer the question: the summary does not indicate which of the existing guidelines are right for you, if any. The printout simply displays your responses to opinion questions, rather than trying to tell you what your opinion means. But that’s the point: to get a real answer, you need to talk to your doctor.
NPR Breast Screening Solutions
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