If you’re a woman living in the U.K., the National Health Service will invite you to come in for mammography screening for breast cancer every three years from age 50 through 69.1 In Australia, women ages 50 through 74 are advised to undergo screening every two years. Women in Uruguay ages 40 to 59 are obliged to get mandatory mammograms every two years, and in Austria, women are told, “Participation is entirely up to you!” [...]
All of these guidelines claim to be “evidence-based,” yet they differ on when women should start getting mammograms and how often they should be screened.
How could these expert scientific panels look at virtually the same evidence and come to different conclusions? The answer is that the evidence offers only a starting point. Studies provide statistics, but it’s up to researchers to interpret them. What a group chooses to accept as evidence will shape its conclusions, and the way the ACS and USPSTF panels considered and weighed the studies on mammography led them to disparate recommendations. [...]
Underneath the debate about at which age and at what frequency we should urge women to get mammograms, another important question looms: Is it reasonable to recommend a test that will produce false positives for something like half of the people who take it? Is it OK to risk harming hundreds of women in hopes of helping a handful avert a breast cancer death? The ACS and USPSTF have concluded yes, but that’s a value judgment, not a scientific one.
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