1 in 4 states cut back on mammograms

[sabra]

Source: MSNBC/Reuters

Findings renew concerns about controversial guidelines

CHICAGO - Some U.S. states have begun using controversial new breast cancer screening guidelines to stop offering routine mammograms for uninsured women in their 40s, a survey by the Avon Foundation for Women released on Monday found.

The Avon survey of more than 150 breast cancer health educators and providers from 48 states and Washington, D.C. found a quarter of the states have either cut or eliminated screening mammography and other early detection services for women under 50.

The survey renewed concerns that the guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which raised the recommended age for women to start getting screened for breast cancer to 50, might be used to deny health coverage for women.

"Lawmakers at all levels need to act now to ensure that these recommendations do no further damage, and that women have full and ready access to mammography," Dr. James Thrall, chair of the American College of Radiology's Board of Chancellors, said in a statement.

Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35524647/ns/health-womens_health/

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. There are missiles to be built, goddamnit!

:patriot:

[samplegirl]

2. Sadly a friend of mine passed this week

from breast cancer it was not found soon enough.

:cry:

[Tumbulu]

3. You know, I am sorry, but this makes sense.

Scientists examined the data and recommended that women under 50 get more false positives than cancers found and that the radiation from these exams is not insignificant. This is their recommendation. It makes sense that governments listed to them.

In Europe and Canada this is the norm. Why shouldn't our governments listed to science? What is the matter with the other 3/4 of the states is my question. By the way I am a woman and am over 50. I consider breast cancer a very serious issue and this is why I care what scientists conclude after examining all the data.

[Green_Lantern]

4. the 1 woman who is screened and positive disagrees..

I'm sorry but the Obama admin. promised that these were just recommendations and that women would be allowed the individual choice of whether or not to get mammograms and now the decision is being forced on uninsured women.


Another broken promise by Obama.

[Igel]

12. From what I've read, promise not broken.

To the extent he has any authority to keep it. Which is the problem: He promised that his little part of the country wouldn't use the recommendations, but he had no authority to promise for the rest of the country. He presides, he doesn't dictate.

However, you point out rather nicely why the initial recommendations were in place: We know about the cancers that are caught. We can point and say, "Look, there's one."

Nobody looks and points at the false positives because we don't care about them, no matter what emotional effects they have. ("Mrs. Smith, you have breast cancer -- ha! Just kidding!") Nobody looks and points at the incremental risk caused by the radiation, because nobody can say, "Mrs. Smith, if you didn't have those mammograms you wouldn't have breast cancer now." Nobody looks at cases of cancer that were caught and says, "Oh, but we'd have caught that anyway using this means or that method over there, and it wouldn't have affected the survival rate but would certainly have saved a lot of money."

As people say, we must do everything humanly possible to save a life. Well, banning all vehicular traffic for personal ends would save 50k or so lives per year from traffic deaths. Yet we haven't banned it. So it's obvious that when we say it, we really don't mean it. And when we do quantify what "everything humanly possible" actually means, we get really pissed off at being told how mercenary we really in the aggregate.

[hedgehog]

16. That is only true if the early mammogram made a difference

in treatment or outcome.

[mbperrin]

5. Yet cancers are found, and the earlier they are found, the more likely

they are to be cured.

Complaining about not enough cancer being found and waiting around to give it time to develop makes as much sense as finding that people driving off a cliff suffer no damage in the first 30 seconds and so no sign warning of the cliff's edge be posted; instead, posting a sign halfway down that says "Beware of cliff" would do more good, because more crashed cars are found after that.

Ah well, no dollar left unsaved....then we can spend it on a war somewhere....

[hayu_lol]

6. Breast cancer is too dangerous to screw around like this...

on the part of the asshole bean-counters. Not enough cancers are found? For those that have them...doesn't matter that a cheaper treatment has been found/except it doesn't work in their case.

Eliminate because it is an expense means the death of real live women, many with families who depend upon them.

What has our society become?

[Jamastiene]

13. Great post.

Great analogy. :thumbsup:

[Celebration]

9. +1

Our public health money should be spent in areas that make sense scientifically, not politically. For some reason the right to a mammogram under age 50 has gotten to be a political issue. :wtf:

[dipsydoodle]

7. As I've mentioned in the past

in the UK they have mobile walk in units in supermarket carparks whatever for mammograms - prevention is better than cure. Free of course - socialised national health system

[WriteDown]

11. This is our "nationalized" part, but our government has decided that it just isn't "cost-effective"

There are similar instances in the UK. Not saying it's a bad thing overall, but there will always be trade-offs.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30106986/

[hedgehog]

14. I have to question the utility of a walk-in mobile mammogram.

I'm under the impression that part of the process is to compare the most recent x-ray to previous x-rays to determine if there are any changes.

[femrap]

8. Maybe if all the growth

hormones (estrogen) pumped into cows stopped, we wouldn't see so many cases of breast cancer.

Drink water....filtered that is.

[WriteDown]

10. Or maybe not. nt

[hedgehog]

15. I tend to think maybe so.

Decrease in Breast Cancer Rates Related to Reduction in Use of Hormone Replacement Therapy

Age-adjusted breast cancer incidence rates in women in the United States fell 6.7 percent in 2003. During this same period, prescriptions for HRT declined rapidly, following highly-publicized reports from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study that showed an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, blood clots, and urinary incontinence among postmenopausal women who were using hormone replacement therapy that included both estrogen and progestin. The two most commonly prescribed forms of HRT in the United States, Premarin® and PremproTM, had their steepest declines starting in 2002-2003 -- from 61 million prescriptions written in 2001 to 21 million in 2004.

http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/pressreleases/BreastIncidenceDrop

[WriteDown]

17. That doesn't even qualify as correlation...

You're comparing prescription medication to hormones that have been given to an animal which is then processed for consumption.

[hedgehog]

18. Estrogen is estrogen, whether it comes from a prescription,

a so-called "natural" estrogen or is absorbed from the environment or generated by the body in response to an environmental exposure. It makes sense to me that if added estrogen from a prescription is linked to increased rates of breast cancer, so would extra estrogen from any other source.

[WriteDown]

19. Given the denaturation of proteins that occurs during cooking or pasteurization...

that is very unlikely. Oddly enough. There are always scares about the estrogen in soy milk, but most of the panic has been debunked.

[w8liftinglady]

20. this says it all...re: younger women and breast cancer

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080708182543.htm
Young Women's Breast Cancers Have More Aggressive Genes, Worse Prognosis
ScienceDaily (July 9, 2008) — Young women's breast cancers tend to be more aggressive and less responsive to treatment than the cancers that arise in older women, and researchers at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy may have discovered part of the reason why: young women's breast cancers share unique genomic traits that the cancers in older women do not exhibit.



"Clinicians have long noted that the breast cancers we see in women under the age of 45 tend to respond less well to treatment and have higher recurrence rates than the disease we see in older women, particularly those over the age of 65," said Kimberly Blackwell, M.D., a breast oncologist at Duke and senior investigator on the study. "Now we're really understanding why this is the case, and by understanding this, we may be able to develop better and more targeted therapies to treat these younger women."