VIDEO: Expert discusses recent updates to screening guidelines for breast cancer

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[Walker Lyons, MD] I think it's important to start there with the fact that the United States Preventative Service Task Force actually just changed the screening guidelines for breast cancer just this year. So, they lowered the starting age for a screening mammogram from 50 to 40, but they're still recommending a biannual mammogram. That caused a little bit of controversy in that some other societies such as the NCCA and the American College of Radiology and the American Cancer Society all think that patients should get annual screening mammograms starting at 40. That being said, it's obviously a little too early to say whether or not those screening guidelines have changed our detection rates as they just went into effect. But I would say overall that over the last one to two decades, our screening guidelines and our screening have obviously improved our breast cancer treatment rates. The death rate from breast cancer has decreased around 1.2% per year over the last decade. I think this is due to a number of different factors, including our surgical treatments, our chemotherapy treatments, our radiation therapy treatments. But I also think that our screening guidelines have obviously helped us catch breast cancers at earlier stages.