PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

27-May-2014

Contact: Raul Reyes rareyes@utmb.edu 409-747-0794 University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

GALVESTON Researchers have concluded that providing better access to health care may lead to the overuse of mammograms for women who regularly see a primary care physician and who have a limited life expectancy.

The cautionary note from researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is that screening women in this category could subject them "to greater risks of physical, emotional and economic suffering."

Dr. Alai Tan, a senior biostatistician in UTMB's Sealy Center on Aging and lead author of the study, said that "there has been little systematic attempt to define guidelines that would help determine when breast cancer screening might not be appropriate or overused.

"The American Cancer Society guidelines on screening, for example, have had no upper age limit," Tan wrote in the study. "This is different from the case with prostate-specific antigen screening, where both the American Cancer Society and the American Urological Association have longstanding guidelines that exclude men with a less than 10-year life expectancy."

The study was published in the June edition of Medical Care, the official journal of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association.

Using data from 2006 through 2009, researchers studied about 5 percent the Medicare claims filed during that period by women whose life expectancy was less than seven years. They further studied where the women lived and whether they had a primary care physician.

In general, the researchers found that the use of mammograms decreases as a woman's life expectancy grows smaller. However, they found that the general downtrend as a woman ages could be offset by better access to health care.

The rest is here:

More access to health care may lead to unnecessary mammograms