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Originally Posted by glatt
So scientists are recommending something based on studies and numbers and stuff, and the politicians think it's political suicide to implement the changes recommended by the scientists. So they are simply ignoring the science. There ought to be a thread for posting examples of this sort of perverting of science for politics.
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I don't think it is perverting science. The study says "only" 15% of women would have their cancer detected by screening in their 40's. ONLY 15%??????? That's quite a few lives, doncha think? We are not talking about epidemiology among squirrels here - these are human lives.
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Robert Smith, director of cancer screening for the American Cancer Society, says his organization also is sticking with the current guidelines "because we not only looked at the evidence that the task force looked at, but we also looked at newer, modern data."
Smith says a good part of the current disconnect is due to the rules of evidence used by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. It's a rigorous system that values above all else the "gold standard" of large randomized trials of screening tests such as mammography.
That's all well and good, he says, but mammography screening has reached the point where these expensive trials are vanishingly rare — if not practically and ethically impossible.
Smith cites a very recent study from Sweden, where mammography has a long history and record-keeping is meticulous. It's not a randomized trial of mammography, but instead compares breast cancers diagnosed in different time periods among women who were screened for cancer with mammograms and women who weren't. "It includes hundreds of thousands of women examined over many, many years," he says.
Breast cancer deaths declined 19 percent over time among women who didn't get regular mammograms. But women who did get screening mammograms had a 48 percent reduction in breast cancer mortality.
That's very different from the U.S. task force's estimate. It says the evidence indicates that mammograms reduce breast cancer deaths by 15 percent among women ages 40 to 49.
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=120562878