New breast cancer screening guidelines: Say what?

Yeah, so you had to know I might have something to say about this. I didn't find my cancer with a regular mammogram or a self exam. I found it by "accident." Still, what the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended makes my blood boil. It builds on this assumption that breast cancer is an "older woman's disease" and it just isn't happening in younger women. Sure, it's not happening as often, but it's happening more and more. I was diagnosed at age 38, two years before my regular mammograms would have started. Fortunately, I had been doing regular self exams, so that I knew when something didn't feel right.

Not only does the Task Force recommend regular mammograms start at 50 and then are only given every two years, but it poo poos the notion of regular self exams. In so many words, they encourage women to just let it go. If I'd just let it go, I'd have been dead. If others I know who did find their cancer through mammograms had just let it go, they'd be dead. 

The fact is that most breast cancers found in young women are more aggressive than those found in their older counterparts. With these guidelines women risk finding cancerous tumors in their breast later stages when treatments are harsher and the chances of survival decrease.

Really, it's about weighing the options. The argument that these new recommendations would keep women from going through the "agony" of unnecessary exams and false positives makes me cringe. If you discover your positive is a false, that's a blessing in my book. The agony, my friends, is when the positive is actually positive.

Find some interesting facts about breast cancer in young women at the Young Survival Coalition website.