Mammography Screening Decreasing
For a long time, women have known that they needed to get annual mammograms after the age of forty in order to check for early stages of breast cancer. As a result of this widespread awareness, the number of women who get screened steadily climbed for many years. However, there has now
been shown to be a drop in the number of women getting screened.
The drop seems to be small but it's an issue of concerns to medical practitioners who work in this area. Early detection of breast cancer is crucial to stopping the spread of the disease and allowing the patient to survive through the ordeal. If women are less likely to get screened, the problem of breast cancer is likely to grow.
It is unclear what the reasons are that women are getting screened less. What's interesting is that this comes at a time when medical advances have found that women may want to be getting more screening, not less. For example, it is being recommended that some women get a
breast MRI in addition to the regular mammogram.
Question of the Day: What would cause rates of breast cancer screening to go down even as more advanced forms of screening for breast cancer are being developed?photo link
