{"id":713,"date":"2015-05-12T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/?p=713"},"modified":"2017-08-21T11:50:06","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T11:50:06","slug":"primary-care-corner-with-geoffrey-modest-md-mammography-screening-again-from-another-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/2015\/05\/12\/primary-care-corner-with-geoffrey-modest-md-mammography-screening-again-from-another-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Primary Care Corner with Geoffrey Modest MD: Mammography screening, again, from another perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By: Dr. Geoffrey Modest<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;color: black\">This editorial is from Eric Topol, and raises concerns about the utility of mammography screening . one issue not addressed by him is primary prevention of breast cancer by decreasing environmental exposure to carcinogens: there are thousands of new chemicals developed in the US each year; historically many of them have estrogenic effects (which may not be the only way that breast cancer is stimulated); they seem to make their way into our air, water, and food supply;\u00a0and essentially none of them have any significant safety checks prior to being mass-produced and\u00a0released.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;color: black\">So, I agree with Topol that mammography is a\u00a0terrible test in many ways, and in particular that it prevents so few breast cancer deaths in the current setting where breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women (in 2013 total of 273K women died of cancer, 72K from lung and 39K from breast). \u00a0I did post about\u00a0the new USPSTF recommendations recently, and\u00a0this and other breast cancer screening\u00a0blogs\u00a0can be found <a href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/category\/breast-cancer\/\">here<\/a>.\u00a0Topol brings up the intriguing suggestion that maybe we can risk-stratify women, such that low risk women (esp low genetic risk) might not get screening mammograms at all, where the likelihood of a false positive is very high, along with the attendant issues of anxiety, medicalization, followup testing, invasive biopsies, more potentially cancer-causing\u00a0xrays, and even\u00a0unnecessary toxic\u00a0chemo\/radiotherapy. and mammograms could be used for more targeted higher risk women. needless to say, this would need to be tested&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Calibri',sans-serif;color: black\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By: Dr. Geoffrey Modest This editorial is from Eric Topol, and raises concerns about the utility of mammography screening . one issue not addressed by him is primary prevention of breast cancer by decreasing environmental exposure to carcinogens: there are thousands of new chemicals developed in the US each year; historically many of them have [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/2015\/05\/12\/primary-care-corner-with-geoffrey-modest-md-mammography-screening-again-from-another-perspective\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14283],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmjebmspotlight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}