It's October, and the world is awash in pink for breast cancer awareness month. But if decades of walks and fundraisers haven't muted your ability to hear any news about breast cancer, you noticed that three studies out this month complicate the picture painted by a study from a year ago, which recommended that women between 40 and 50 stop getting annual mammograms unless they are at risk. New studies in Denmark and Norway found that mammographies have a small or even no appreciable effect on breast-cancer death rates. Even if there is a benefit to all women regularly getting mammograms in the decade before they hit 50, the benefits aren't huge; a new Swedish study found that it reduced mortality by less than a third for women for that age group.
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women in the United States, so it seems the energy spent fighting over who should get a test that doesn't seem to be that effective, and how often they get it, could be spent instead on finding better screening methods. And speaking of screening methods, there's one that's so effective it's dramatically reduced the death rate from what was once a leading cause of female cancer death in the U.S.: the Pap smear. Not only do we have a good screening method and good treatment options for the cancer in its early stages, but now there's a vaccine to prevent the virus that causes most of the cancers in the first place. All-in-all, there should be almost no women dying of cervical cancer in this country.
But of course, there are -- about 4,000 annually. And it's mostly because of a lack of access to the health-care system. There are ways to get free Pap smears if you don't have a doctor -- just as there are ways to get free mammograms -- but treatment becomes another matter entirely. But we don't catch cancer through programs; we catch it when patients are regularly and routinely engaging with the health-care system, so that they are consistently monitored and have some agency in their care. And the chances that a woman will develop cervical cancer are largely a matter of race: Hispanic women are twice as likely to get it as non-Hispanic white women, and black women are 50 percent more likely, according to the American Cancer Society. Eradicating the disease might be entirely possible, but it's not something we're doing. January is cervical cancer awareness month, but I've never known anyone to sign up for a 5k, and never had anyone ask me for a donation for care for women who can't afford it.
-- Monica Potts
