Lowering the mammogram age to 40 will save many women. So why doesn't this happen?

Each year, approximately 5,400 new breast cancer patients are diagnosed, a quarter of whom are below the recommended mammogram age. Chairman of the "One of Nine" Association explains why it is essential for the basket committee to keep up to date with these statistics and lower the recommended age for testing for all women

Lowering the mammogram age to 40 will save many women. So why doesn't this happen?

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At 44, I found out I had breast cancer. My gynecologist sent me for a mammogram examination simply because I had reached the age to start. My lump was already 2 inches in size, which means it was there in the year and two years before the age of 44. There was no known risk factor, I didn't know that about 75 percent of breast cancers appear random without any known risk factor. I was lucky, one doctor who realized I had reached the age to be examined, the doctor who saved my life.

The way to cure the most malignant disease among women in Israel

Breast cancer is the most common and most deadly cancer in women. Each year, approximately 5,400 new patients are diagnosed, a quarter of whom are under the recommended mammogram age, 50. Early detection of breast cancer raises recovery rates to over 90 percent. Lowering the age at which it is recommended to be tested to 40 can save the lives of about 30 other, at-risk, women each year. Dozens of women are at risk of having a medical justification to undergo the test at a younger age, but they are not located and invited for a pre-50 test.

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The advancement of age will help early detection and easy treatment for many hundreds of women whose lighter illnesses can undergo limited surgery and not necessarily mastectomy. Most importantly, chemotherapy is sometimes not at all mandatory. This means less physical and mental suffering for families, less financial harm to them as well as health funds and the economy, and more women who can return to the workforce. The total medical costs that will be saved in the first year of application will be about NIS 14 million and in the future will reach tens of millions.

Early detection of the disease may prevent mastectomy and even chemotherapy. Woman examining mammogram (Photo: ShutterStock)

Woman performs a mammogram (Photo: ShutterStock)

There are those who oppose lowering the age of mammograms from 50 to 40, claiming that this test is an unproven and ineffective technique, but the type of mammography examined in this context was largely analogue while mammography is nowadays more digital and accurate. The limit for mammography examination is in cases of dense breast, typical of young women but also present in 40 percent of women over the age of 50. Today, this limit can be overcome thanks to 3D mammography and contrast mammography, and with ultrasound testing as a supplementary test.

Another argument by opponents is the fear of over-diagnosis (ie suspicion that detecting, removing and treating small tumors does not necessarily prevent malignant and dangerous tumors from developing), but for over 15 years there have been molecular tests of breast tumors that have proven to be the most reliable and provide a numerical prediction of development The increase and the degree of its danger, thereby preventing damage from over-diagnosis. This is not the way to prevent early detection from 140,000 women.

Medical organizations support the reduction of age

While the system recognizes the need for women at risk to be tested since the age of 40, it makes no effort to locate these women. One in nine tried to move the wheels to find women at risk but encountered too many obstacles. Lowering the age of mammograms will allow women at risk who are already included in the basket and unaware of their risk of reaching early detection without the need for special activity.

Ultrasound as a supplementary examination for mammography as a solution to the "dense breast" limit. Breast Ultrasound (Photo: ShutterStock)

Illustration (Photo: ShutterStock)

In the meantime, the important medical organizations in America recommend lowering their age to 40, and the Association of Imaging Physicians in Israel explicitly requires it, and those who are familiar with the benefits and limitations of the diagnostic methods. Surgeons have suggested a pathway that starts at age 45 by way of personalization for age, risk and breast density, and the Health Ministry set up to do so has seen the future in this way but declined to discuss it.

Young women can get sick too

From the efforts made by health funds to raise awareness about the age of 50, lowering the age of 40 to 40 is expected to send an unbelievably important message to the entire medical system - even young women can get sick, and fewer doctors will send young women to their homes with breast lumps, who are too young for the disease, Women whose cancer will be detected at an advanced stage.

I appeal to the members of the basket committee, doctors and public figures: open my heart and muster up the courage to leave the convention. Save the lives of dozens of women a year and the lives of thousands of women and their families. Give them what I got from a brave doctor - decades of a good and productive life.

Irit Pent is chairman of One of the Nine