Breast Cancer Screening: Start Young and Stay With It

The US Preventive Services Task Force lowered the age it recommends to start breast cancer screening from age 50 to age 40 years. The American Cancer Society and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend the same and to continue until age 74 years. UC Davis biostatistician Diana Miglioretti, PhD, recently published research that suggests women who receive a false positive breast cancer screening result may be less committed to future screening. Young women are at greater risk for false positives, she explained in an interview with Patient Care,® and women in their 60s are at greater risk for a breast cancer diagnosis. Taken together these facts point to the need for all health care professionals to ensure younger women are not dissuaded from future screening, when it will be the most important, based on an early false positive outcome. Miglioretti explains more in the video above.

Diana Miglioretti, PhD, is professor and division chief of biostatistics in the University of California Davis School of Medicine's department of public health sciences and an affiliate investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Miglioretti co-leads the US Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium, a network of breast imaging registries with information collected on more than 13 million breast imaging examinations since 1994.