A New Study Challenges the Way We Screen for Breast Cancer

A long-awaited study shows that screening for breast cancer with annual mammograms may not always be the best way to catch the disease. In a study published in JAMA and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Dr. Laura Esserman, a breast-cancer surgeon and director of the University of California San Francisco Breast Care center, showed that more personalized screening schedules based on a woman’s risk of developing the disease could be just as effective at detecting cancer. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Esserman launched the WISDOM (Women Informed to Screen Depending on Measures of Risk) study in 2016 to explore whether more personalized evaluations of a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer could lead to alternative screening schedules that would serve them better than uniform yearly mammograms. The first results, which involved more than 28,000 women between ages 40 and 74, suggests that different screening regimens for women at higher and lower risk are as good as the existing annual screens.  The women, none of whom had breast cancer, were randomly assigned to receive either more personalized risk-based screening or the annual screening. They were followed for an average of about five years to see if they  developed the disease. In this first analysis, Esserman and her team found that alternative screening regimens, including more-frequent or less-frequent screening, were similar to yearly screening in detecting breast cancer. That suggests cancers weren’t being missed with the alternative screening schedules. Read More: What to Know About Early Menopause The number of Stage 2B…

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