Mayo Clinic Disagrees with New USPSTF Mammography Screening Guidelines

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

ROCHESTER, Minn. — A task force convened by Mayo Clinic in light of the new mammography screening rates recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has rejected those guidelines. Mayo Clinic physicians and researchers state that the modeling data used in the analysis, along with input from recent clinical trials conducted outside of the United States, do not constitute strong enough data to change Mayo's practice.

VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including comments from Dr. Pruthi, are available on the Mayo Clinic News Blog.

Mayo Clinic will continue to recommend screening mammograms for women age 40 and older. "Everyday we discover invasive breast cancer in a woman age 40–50," says Sandhya Pruthi, M.D., director of the Breast Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and leader of the task force. Also, elderly women for whom such screening is judged potentially beneficial will continue to receive mammograms. Physicians also will continue to advise their patients to be familiar with their breasts, so that any changes in the tissue can be promptly examined.

The task force acknowledges that annual screening does result in some additional imaging, but patients at Mayo Clinic are generally assessed and evaluated within 24 hours in order to reduce anxiety. Physicians in the Breast Clinic also say that a substantial number of women who receive biopsies because of a screening mammogram are found to have cancer.

Mayo Clinic will continue to evaluate new data on mammography and breast cancer detection as information is made available. But at this time, until a validated method exists that can identify tumors that are slow growing and non-lethal from those that are aggressive, Mayo Clinic physicians feel it is in the best interests of their patients to offer routine screening mammography. And while they further acknowledge that reducing the number of mammograms offered to women, along with follow-up testing, would save healthcare dollars, they do not believe that denying quality care is the way to do it.

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