Ladies, do you go for breast screening?

Dont need to answer that, but I have been thumbing through the pages of our paper.
Screening has been quite controversial for a while here, regarding stress over harmless lumps, needless surgery performed. So now this....What are your thoughts? Do they have the mammogram scheme in your country?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1300169/Breast-cancer-screening-harm-women-helps.html

In the Province of British Columbia, Canada (I don't know if it is in the other provinces), women over the age of 40 are urged to get screened every 2 years. After you go once, you get a reminder every year in the mail and you can go every year if you like without cost. I go every two years and the result comes in the mail a month later. That short visit gives me piece of mind.

It is every 5 years here, I believe. But there is now a lot of controversy regarding the way it is conducted and the lumps that apparently would go away on their own, but get removed. Always something to keep us alert isnt there?

I never heard of lumps going away on their own. If I had discovered a lump, I wonder if I could sit still until I discovered if it was benign or not. Isn't time a big factor in cancer?!

Almostangela wrote:I never heard of lumps going away on their own. If I had discovered a lump, I wonder if I could sit still until I discovered if it was benign or not. Isn't time a big factor in cancer?!

I will have to google that one and see exactly what they mean. But there is no doubt that women have had invasive surgery for lumps that were not going to be a problem. As mentioned in the article.
I thin this is what started the controversy Angela.

Maybe this one explains it better.

http://www.canceractive.com/cancer-active-page-link.aspx?n=1420

P

There was a dust up about that research over here right before the Healthcare Reform passed.

I have had a mammogram once a year ever since I turned 40.

I wish they would make up their minds. It's hard enough for us to know what is right, without them all arguing amongst themselves.

I had one at 40. I was supposed to go again this year, but haven't done so yet. My gyn still recommends once a year screening after 40. As far as unnecessary procedures, when they did mine last year they found a couple of lumps. The only further work I needed was to go in and have an ultrasound done. They could easily tell from that that I had cysts. No surgery was required. That said, I'd rather err on the side of caution and have a benign lump tested with biopsy than to miss a malignant one because I didn't screen often enough.

Brenda, I think the suggestion is that some of the scans whatever that they do can actually cause problems.
I think that is what has caused a lot of the controversy. Too many scans Xrays and biopsies....
Maybe google it.

Lumps can indeed go away on their own, depending upon the kind of lump. I had one several years ago (in my mid-20's) that I found doing my own self-exam, something I usually forget to do. Because I was so young, they couldn't perform a mammogram on me, as younger women have denser tissue, which can't be read in a mammogram. That is one concern that some have with mammograms as young as 40 and is why Kaiser doesn't recommend you start them until 50 unless your doctor recommends earlier because of family history.

Although the ultrasound came back thinking it was 80% benign, and the doctor said I could just wait six months and come back for another to see if it grew, I wanted the peace of mind, so had the biopsy. It was no big deal, just a tiny incision that hardly hurt at all. Within a couple years, the lump had disappeared.

I know that there is some controversy about mammograms catching lumps that aren't malignant and causing unnecessary biopsies, but since a biopsy is not a very big deal (at least mine wasn't), it seems well worth the difficulty of going for a biopsy just to be sure that you catch any cancer before it gets too serious.

I'm too young (33) to go in for mammograms, but my mom does religiously, as her mother had breast cancer and she once had a benign lump too. She gets hers read immediately, and they even have her previous scans ready to compare them for any changes. She could go to a satellite clinic and just have the results mailed to her, but she likes going to the main office, where she can get it read right away and know that it is being taken care of immediately.