Women who skip regular mammograms run greater risk of dying from breast cancer

(DIAGNOSTIC IMAGING) -- A long-term study of breast imaging in Massachusetts has confirmed what mammographers have argued for years: older adult women who do not receive regular screening mammography are far more likely to die of breast cancer than women who routinely undergo the procedure. The findings were drawn from the experience of 6997 Massachusetts women who did, or did not, participate in regular screening and were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer between 1990 and 1999. The women also had to have follow-up data in their records through 2007 in order be included in the current study, according to lead author Dr. Blake Cady, professor of surgery emeritus at Harvard and Brown University in Providence, RI. After a median of 12.5 years of follow-up, Cady and colleagues confirmed 461 deaths from breast cancer in the study population. Of those deaths, 15.6% resulted from nonpalpable, screen-detected cancers while 9.6% resulted from palpable, interval cancers. For regularly screened women, the total number of deaths was 116 or 25.2%. The remaining 345 breast cancer deaths were among women who were not screened. Nearly two-thirds (60.9%) of the deaths occurred among women who had never undergone screening while 5% occurred in women who had at least one previous mammogram, but not within two years of diagnosis.

See full article and related articles at DiagnosticImaging.com

This article was republished with permission from CMPMedica, LLC