VIDEO: Updated breast cancer screening guidelines ‘better serve’ younger patients

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The screening guidelines for breast cancer have, over the years, sometimes being fraught with controversies, because there's been different bodies come out with different interpretations of the existing literature. And based on that, each guideline group sometimes have come up with different recommendations. And that continues to be the case. You know, we have different guidelines, but the most recent change was from the United States Preventive Services Task Force Guidelines for breast cancer. And I would say that the main change was that it lowered the age of screening now more definitively from age 50 to 40. And some other organizations had already, you know, made that recommendation. But the USPSTF was still leaving a little bit of wiggle room between age 40 and 50, saying that there wasn't sufficient evidence, and that could be considered, and it needed to be a discussion between the clinicians and the patients between ages 40 and 50.

But now the recommendation is to start screening at age 40, and continuing through age 74. So I think that that change, we view it as a very positive change. I think it's going to better serve younger women. And there has been concern that in the most recent years, we're seeing diagnosis of breast cancer at earlier ages than in the past. And we see many more women being diagnosed shortly after the age of 40. And of course, this was a population that was not routinely screened before. So we think that that's going to help younger women and perhaps lead to earlier detection, because in younger women, unfortunately, we also see that breast cancer can be more aggressive compared to when diagnosed in the later decades of life. So I think it's going to help that population, and I think it's also hopefully going to help decrease some of the disparities as well, because we have known for some time that Black women, African American women, are diagnosed with breast cancer at younger ages than Caucasian populations. So I'm hopeful that this change will increase earlier detection of cancer in minority populations as well.