Many doctors are simply shrugging off a federal panel's advice for younger women to skip mammograms until they're 50.

   "The New York Times" reports that patients aren't buying the panel's reasoning that regular screenings for 40-somethings results in too many unnecessary tests and generates anxiety.

   Dr. Carolyn Runowicz, director of a cancer center at the University of Connecticut, said, quote, "My patients tell me they can live with a little anxiety and distress but they can't live with a little cancer."  A federal task force found that mammograms for women under age 50 only prevented one death for every two-thousand women screened.

   As Dr. Jacues Moritz, who heads the gynecology department at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, put it, that "doesn't mean anything until you're the one."  The new guidelines issued on Monday will at least bolster the confidence of the 10-to-15-percent of women who refuse to get any mammogram at all.

   Said Dr. Deborah Gahr, a gynecologist in New York, quote, "Nothing in medicine is black and white."

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation issued Monday that women in their 40s don't need mammograms is being defended by a member of that group.

   Dr. Lucy Marion is the dean of the School of Nursing at the Medical College of Georgia.

   She says the team based the recommendation on a huge amount of data gleaned from many studies done over many years.

   Marion is clarifying the recommendation saying it didn't tell women in their 40s not to screen, just not to "routinely screen."  She says there are harms associated with mammograms including false positives that can cause unnecessary worry about cancer.

   She says the harm has to be weighed against the benefits to the "few women" who would benefit from routine screening in their 40s.




   (Copyright 2009 by VERTEXNews/Newsroom Solutions)