Breast Cancer Awareness

Eleonora Teplinsky, MD

Teplinsky reports no relevant financial disclosures.
September 28, 2023
2 min watch
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VIDEO: Breast cancer screening should not be ‘one-size-fits-all’

Transcript

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One of the biggest barriers is screening for breast cancer. There are a number of mixed messages out there about when to start screening and with which modalities and there is misinformation that lives online in terms of not doing mammography and recommending things like thermography, which is, to be clear, misinformation. Mammography is the standard of care for breast cancer screening, but there's controversy and conflict over which age people should start screening at. And the challenge is that we're seeing younger and younger breast cancer, and within that, there are racial and ethnic disparities that occur. And so this notion of starting screening at one age for everyone is really becoming outdated and I think it is not a one-size-fits-all. One challenge is making sure that all patients are getting appropriate breast cancer risk assessments starting at age 25 and periodically thereafter, so that we can identify who's at higher risk and maybe should start getting screening earlier with supplemental modalities on top of mammography. The other part is access to care and there are racial and ethnic disparity in that as well and making sure that patients have access to health care, have access to getting treatment in a timely-manner. And this can be really quite hard.