breast cancer screening,” Fallah adds.
Family history matters
Kamal says relatives’ history matters, too.
“We agree that screening should be individualized,” Kamal says, adding that family history is a key to that. He recommends that women of all races be aware of their family history of cancer — not only breast cancer — and share it with their doctor when talking about mammography screening.
To close the nation’s racial disparity in breast cancer deaths, though, Kamal says it’s important to look beyond screening.
“The completion of the screening mammogram is not where the disparity is,” he shares. Instead, Kamal says, Black women tend to face barriers in “what comes after screening” — including access to timely surgery and other treatments.
There are downsides to cancer screening, Fallah points out: A major one is that it can yield false-positive results that lead to unnecessary, sometimes invasive, follow-up tests, as well as anxiety.
And earlier or more frequent screening raises the odds of those downsides.
But the risk should also be seen in context, says Dr. Kathie-Ann Joseph, a surgical oncologist at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center in New York City.
Women undergoing screening mammography, she says, “get recalled for additional imaging about 10 percent of the time, and biopsies are needed in one to two percent of cases, which is quite low.”
“This has to be compared to the lives saved from earlier screening mammography,” says Joseph, who was not involved in the study.
She adds that “earlier screening can have other benefits, by allowing women of all racial and ethnic groups to have less-extensive surgery and less chemotherapy, which impacts quality of life.”
Your risk for developing breast cancer can differ from other women and also change over time no matter your age, so it is best to consult with your doctor.