This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Decline in mammography attributed to drop in hormone therapy for younger women

Breen N. Cancer. 2011;117:5450-5460.

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

A drop in the number of women undergoing hormone therapy was associated with a decline in the number of women undergoing mammography for those aged 50 to 64 years. There was no such association for women aged at least 65 years.

Current users of hormone therapy typically have high rates of mammography, so researchers hypothesized that women who discontinue the treatment may also stop undergoing screening. To test that supposition, researchers used data collected from 2000 and 2005 in the National Health Interview Surveys. There were 7,125 women interviewed in 2000 and 7,387 interviewed in 2005.

Recent screening, within 2 years of the survey, declined 4.7% for women aged 50 to 64 years (n=6,709) and 2.5% for women aged 65 years (n=6,212) during the study period. Researchers estimated that 80% of the decline for younger women and 70% of the decline for women aged at least 65 years could be attributed to other factors such as race, socioeconomic status and/or age.

Researchers then tested for an association between changes in hormone therapy use and changes in mammography use for the population of women aged at least 50 years. For women aged 50 to 64 years, there was no significant interaction between current use of hormone and survey year. Women who stopped therapy had lower screening rates than when they were taking hormone therapy, thus reducing their mammography rates to the level previously observed in nonusers.

For women aged at least 65 years, researchers determined that change in hormone therapy use had less effect on mammography use compared with younger women. Older women who reported that they were current users of hormone therapy had lower rates of mammography in 2005 than in 2000, whereas nonusers had similar rates of mammography use in both years.

Earn CME this spring at the HemOnc Today Breast Cancer Review & Perspective meeting to be held March 23-24, 2012 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront. See details at HemOncTodayBreastCancer.com.

Follow HemOncToday.com on Twitter.