“When Can I Stop Having Mammograms?”

How many times have your older mammography patients asked you this question?

My guess is quite often!

With aging comes a huge onslaught of additional things that need to be done in a timely manner. Bone densities, colonoscopies, pap smears, lots of blood work, dental visits, eye doctor appointments, electrocardiograms... The list could go on and on of all of the methods that keep us healthy as we journey into that "Golden Age."

No wonder our patients ask us when they can stop having mammograms. I try to answer them with a little bit of humor and tell them that I would miss seeing them far too much and they really do need to come back to see me next year.

In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center suggest that mammography benefits may have no age limits.

Researchers studied older women and breast cancer and found that only 22 percent of women age 80 and over were regularly screened with mammography. "Regularly screened" was defined as having at least three mammograms in the past five years.

Twenty nine percent of women in this age bracket had only one or two mammograms during the past five years. A total of 49 percent of women in this age bracket had no mammography in the five years before their diagnosis.

The more often a woman was screened, the more likely she was to be diagnosed with an earlier stage breast cancer than those women who were not as compliant.  The researchers did say that you must also realize that women who are getting screened more frequently are possibly in better physical condition than those who are not because of other health issues.

About seventeen percent of breast cancers are diagnosed in women age 80 and above.  So armed with a little bit of data, perhaps we can persuade those women to indeed come back again next year!