The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a group of independent medical experts whose recommendations help guide doctors’ decisions and influence insurance plans, recently released the proposed update to its breast cancer screening guidelines. The USPSTF is proposing that all women at average risk of breast cancer start screening at age 40 to reduce their risk of dying from the disease, according to a new draft recommendation statement. The draft recommendation is for all people assigned female at birth, including cisgender women, trans men and nonbinary people, who are at average risk for breast cancer.
“Our new task force recommendation is recommending that women start screening with mammography for breast cancer at age 40 and screen every other year until age 74,” said USPSTF Vice Chair Dr Wanda Nicholson, a senior associate dean and professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. It’s an update to the 2016 recommendation, in which the task force recommended that biennial mammograms, which are x-rays of the breasts, start at age 50 and that the decision for women to screen in their 40s ‘should be an individual one’.
Tuesday. The recommendation is not final but will be available on the task force website for public comment through June 5, along with a draft evidence review and draft modelling report.
To review and update breast cancer screening guidelines, the task force members analysed data from thousands of study abstracts and hundreds of research papers on screening programs, cancer cases and deaths in the United States. They found that screening with mammograms every other year provided a moderate benefit to women ages 40 to 74. The benefits, such as detecting cancer early, outweigh the potential harms, such as the risk of a false positive that could lead to unnecessary tests and emotional stress.
The task force also noticed that the rate of breast cancer diagnoses has been rising yearly among women at younger ages. Population-based data “showed that the rate of breast cancer diagnoses was increasing by 2 per cent annually since 2015. So more women than ever before are being diagnosed in their 40s,” Nicholson said.