Do they reduce womens risk of dying from breast cancer?
Yes. They reduce it by about 15% for women in their 40s and 50s, the task force says. But their absolute benefit for younger women, whose risk of cancer is very low, is much smaller. Making that tiny risk even smaller doesn’t prevent many deaths, says Eric Winer of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Doctors would have to screen 1,904 women ages 39-49 for a decade to prevent one death, vs. 1,339 women 50-59 and 377 women 60-69, according to a study accompanying the recommendations in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Q: Why not get a mammogram anyway, just to be safe? A: Many find them stressful, painful, time-consuming and, depending on insurance, expensive, says Laura Petitti, vice chair of the panel and a doctor at Arizona State University-Phoenix. Also, after 10 mammograms, more than half of fortysomething women will have a “false positive,” which occurs when a mammogram detects something suspicious that turns out to be benign, Petitti says. Suspicious findings cause anxiety and
