Aged-Based Breast Cancer Screening Has A Greater Mortality Benefit Than Risk-Based Breast Cancer Screening

Risk-based factors for risk-based breast cancer screening including family history, race, age, prior breast biopsy, and breast density have not been evaluated in routine screening mammography practice. “Growing interest in risk-based screening creates an urgent mandate to determine effectiveness,” said Elizabeth S. Burnside, MD of the department of radiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health in Radiology Business.

As such, in a recent issue of Radiology, the journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), Dr. Burnside and her colleagues compared two approaches to screening women in their 40s for breast cancer: an age-based approach of screening all women annually starting at age 45 versus a risk-based approach of screening higher-risk women ages 40-49 years. They looked at data from 10,000 digital screening mammograms from…