Breast Cancer Screening Recommendations Focus on Patient Preference

The American Cancer Society has made changes in its recommendations for breast cancer screening. A new article discusses the evidentiary support for the recent changes. In addition to modifying the suggested ages for annual and biannual mammography, the new recommendations also focus on patient preference in decision making.

The authors discuss the subtle but very important difference between the sensitivity and false positive rates for mammography. Among asymptomatic women, even though approximately 84% of breast cancers are detected by mammography, approximately 95% of all positive mammograms are false positives.

"Our goal was to caution asymptomatic women that positive mammograms are vastly more likely to be false positives than actual evidence of cancer," said Dr. William Skorupski, co-author of the Significance article. "For most women, a false positive mammogram is about 19 times more likely than a true positive," added co-author Dr. Howard Wainer.



Source-Eurekalert