Is There a Crisis in Mammography?
June 29, 2009
While a recommendation from a physician is known to be a strong predictor of whether a woman obtains a screening mammogram, as many as 71 percent of unscreened women who had visited a provider in the past year received no such recommendation, according to a recent national survey of 40,000 households.
The in-person survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics is cited in a recent article co-authored by Clare Bradley, MD, MPH, Senior Vice President/Chief Medical Officer of IPRO. The authors note that older women are less likely than younger woman to have their physicians recommend a screening mammography and the likelihood of a recommendation decreases among women with chronic medical conditions. "As long as fewer than two-thirds of women with health insurance and less than half of uninsured women are getting annual mammograms, we cannot realize the full life-saving potential of regular mammography," say the authors. Other factors cited in explaining the recent four-year, nationwide decline in screening mammography include fear of the procedure, inconsistent screening guidelines from expert panels, lengthy wait times for appointments and insurance co-pays and deductibles. The article "Is There a Crisis in Mammography?" was published last fall in Perspectives, a journal of the New Jersey Academy of Family Physicians. The article was published under the auspices of the American Cancer Society Eastern Division Mammography Strike Force. For additional information, contact the Division at www.cancer.org.