Mammogram Screening Program and Its Issues

Written by docteam Wednesday, 31 March 2010 01:12

Health problem like breast cancer is one of serious problems that attack many women all over the world. The most discussed news about this cancer regarding the use of mammogram screening programs toward women who really need to be screened. The struggle to fight cancer has been conducted for years with purpose to detect the disease and save more lives.

On the other hand, the mammograms are unfortunately showing slight of imperfection and giving side effects like false alarm and unneeded biopsies. This program also doesn’t give significant improvement for women’s odds of survival. Therefore, the mammogram resulted in big issue especially in United States learning that many officials have promoted the breast cancer screening through mammograms. The debate arouse when influential government panel suggested scaling back screening programs to begin at age 50 instead of 40. However, this advice was then rejected by American Cancer Society and some experts.

Generally, tumors are slow-growing in most women and it increases as they are ageing. Thus, by extending the age from 40 to 50 for mammogram screening may be risky. Furthermore, another problem appears is that people start to question whether the mammograms screening is really working or not. Since there are many overtreatment conducted, perhaps it would be the time to re-evaluate to ensure that it really outweighs the harms. According to U.S researchers, five lives were saved per thousand women screened.

Apart from those issues, many countries are still rolling out mammogram programs to detect the cancer earlier. These countries keep trying to persuade women to be screened to reduce the risk that women with breast cancer will be missed.