Mammography

In a major reversal, the National Cancer Institute is announcing plans to change its own guidelines on recommending mammograms for premenopausal women.Instead of urging that all women aged 40 to 49 be screened every year or two with mammograms, a position the institute has held since 1987, the NCI, citing inconclusive evidence from eight randomized trials and controversy among specialists, is now proposing that women under 50 get the X-rays only when advised to do so by their doctors.The institute is not saying that younger women should not have regular mammograms, nor is it suggesting that mammograms are dangerous.

When a government advisory panel put out new recommendations last week that said women under age 50 need not be screened for breast cancer, the calls began flowing to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski's office. Within days, the Maryland senator had responded with an amendment to the Senate's pending health care reform bill that would guarantee access to mammograms at age 40 through public insurance exchanges. With the health legislation as the backdrop, politicians in Maryland and across the country have reacted swiftly to the breast cancer lobby - a group that has made early screening a mantra and pink ribbons a powerful symbol in fighting the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women.

WASHINGTON -- In a development expected to save thousands of women's lives, Congress has added mammography benefits to Medicare that will pay for breast cancer screening for people 65 and older and the disabled beginning next year.The new benefits, which will cover women and men, were agreed to during the final hours of budget negotiations last Friday by an all-male committee meeting in secret. But the committee worked under a warning from leaders of the 140-member congressional women's issues caucus, who said they would oppose any budget that failed to include mammography benefits, according to lawmakers involved in the negotiations.

At this moment there are 2.5 million women in the United States with breast cancer. Approximately 1 million of these women don't even know they have it.Those numbers are frightening in a world where breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in women and the second leading cause of cancer death after lung cancer. That is why most women's health organizations recommend that all women 40 and older have clinical breast examinations annually. This examination should be coupled with mammograms every year for women over 50 and every one to two years for women aged 40 to 49.Q: How important is getting a mammogram?

A report in The Wall Street Journal raised troubling questions about the recent decision of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a 16-member panel of independent medical experts, to cancel a meeting that had been set for around Election Day. One of the important items on the agenda was to have been a vote on the utility of prostate cancer screening. The most recent recommendations, from 2008, state that prostate screening should not be conducted for men older than 75. For younger men, the evidence around the preferred screening test (the prostate specific antigen, or PSA, blood test)

As Mother's Day approaches, health organizations are once again gearing up to send mothers -- and daughters -- a powerful message about breast cancer. The message: Catch it early. Get a mammogram.But this week, many younger women will be greeting this appeal with profound confusion and annoyance. News trickling out of a massive study of Canadian women has suggested that women in their 40s who get annual mammograms do nothing to lower their chances of dying of breast cancer."I've had calls today from patients who are reasonably hysterical," said Dr. Alex Munitz, chairman of radiology at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center and a vocal critic of the study.

Bureaucratic `beast' enhances our lives and protects citizens I wonder why The Sun gave space to Crispin Sartwell's silly diatribe about the federal bureaucracy ("The bureaucratic beast spits out only stupidity," Opinion Commentary, March 18). Mr. Sartwell's thesis that "every government bureaucracy that deals with the public is a huge, lumbering tribute to human ingenuity in making our lives impossible" is out of touch with reality. I have been around for six decades and have never found my life impossible or controlled on a day-to-day basis by these systems of power.

As Mother's Day approaches, health organizations are once again gearing up to send mothers -- and daughters -- a powerful message about breast cancerThe message: Catch it early. Get a mammogram.But this week, many younger women will be greeting this appeal with profound confusion and annoyance. News trickling out of a massive study of Canadian women has suggested that women in their 40s who get annual mammograms do nothing to lower their chances of dying of breast cancer."I've had calls today from patients who are reasonably hysterical," said Dr. Alex Munitz, chairman of radiology at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center and a vocal critic of the study.

Cancer experts say there is new evidence that women at high risk for breast cancer should undergo magnetic resonance imaging to search for early malignancies typically missed by traditional breast exams and mammography. A study published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine said MRI exams found previously undetected cancer in the "healthy" breast of 3 percent of women already diagnosed with cancer in the other. Catching those hidden cancers early allows doctors to treat them and improve patients' chances for survival.

Cancer kills many women, especially low-income women, because they can't afford mammography exams and Pap smear tests or because they don't understand the importance of regular screening, health experts say.Of the 1,772 women who died from breast and cervical cancer in Maryland in 1987 and 1988, the most recent period for which figures are available, more than a third might have been saved if their cancers had been discovered early enough, according to...