The heads of a high-level US medical panel acknowledged Wednesday they "fumbled the message" about when women should begin having routine screening mamograms in a controversial report last month. "We communicated very poorly," Diana Petitti, vice chair of the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), said during an hours-long grilling by lawmakers about the report, which caused a firestorm when it was published in a medical journal two weeks ago.In the report, the task force said there was "evidence that the net benefit of having regular screening mamograms was small for women aged 40 to 49." It recommended that regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer start at 50 instead of the currently recommended 40 and that women have them every two years instead of annually.
The advise was almost immediately denounced by doctors who warned that if it were followed more women would die from breast cancer, which already claims some 40,000 lives a year in the United States. Petitti agreed that one of the task force's main recommendations was that women age 50-74 should have a mamogram every other year, but was less unequivocal than the report that women start routine breast cancer screening later in life.
0 comments:
Post a Comment