I cut and pasted this article from NPR. It doesn’t have anything to do with BRCA1, BRCA2, prophylactic mastectomies or DIEP flap reconstruction. But I thought it relevant and a good thing to repost. When my sister was diagnosed, she was 31. She’d never had a mammogram or breast MRI. She had stage 1 breast cancer, but her form of breast cancer was fast growing. We are all lucky that she just happened to roll over and feel that awkward, uncomfortable lump one night and decided to have it looked at. That lump changed all of our lives, but mostly hers. To my sister, Alyssa, I LOVE YOU and I am so proud of your ability and willingness to fight!:
My sister, Alyssa, with one of my daughters (Liv)
Women should get screened for breast cancer in their 40s, a study concludes, because they face a greater risk of death when cancers aren’t found early.
Women who were diagnosed with cancer in their 40s and died of the disease were more likely to have never had a mammogram than were older women, according to the study.
Seventy percent of the women diagnosed with cancer in their 40s who later died hadn’t had a mammogram, compared to 50 percent of women in their 60s. Half of the cancer deaths in the study were in women who had been diagnosed before age 50.
“Breast cancer is primarily a disease of older women, but younger women tend to have faster-growing cancer,” says , a professor of women’s health and radiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. She wasn’t involved in the study.
“There are people who feel that screening doesn’t reduce death rates, that it’s all in treatment,” Monsees tells Shots. “This study corroborates prior studies that screening mammograms save lives.”
Breast cancer is in younger women, and is most often diagnosed when women are over 60. But in this study, the death rate for women diagnosed in their 40s was almost twice that of women diagnosed in their 70s.
The study is sure to add to the ongoing controversy over when and how often women should get mammograms. It backs up the American Cancer Society’s that women get mammograms every year starting at age 40.
But in 2009, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federally funded independent panel, that, in general, women should wait until age 50 to start getting screening mammograms, and then get screened every two years up till age 75.
That recommendation factored in the fact that younger women are more likely to have false positive mammograms, which can lead to unnecessary biopsies and anxiety.
“Overdiagnosis has been completely exaggerated,” says , director of breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and an author of the paper. “Well, calling people back for additional screening causes anxiety, I understand that. But it absolutely saves lives. You reduce the death rate by 30, 40 percent if you start screening at age 40.”
This study looked at women in the Partners HealthCare system in Boston who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer from 1990 to 1999. The researchers then checked the women’s medical records to see if and when they’d had mammograms.
It’s a form of study called a “failure analysis,” a what-went-wrong approach similar to that used in investigating airplane crashes. , an emeritus professor at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School and one of the study authors, tells Shots that he thinks it better reflects the effect of screening than do population-based studies, because the health system records show which women actually got mammograms, rather than say they did.
Of the 7,301 women in the study, 609 had died of breast cancer by 2007. Almost three-quarters of the women who died hadn’t had a mammogram in the two years before the cancer was found.
Overall, 80 percent of the women were getting mammograms at least every two years, well above the . Some of them still got breast cancer, but, overall, the death rates were higher in women whose tumors weren’t found until they could be felt.
“While the analysis reveals that regular screening will not prevent all breast cancer deaths,” Robert Smith, director of screening for the American Cancer Society, told Shots in an email. “It also reveals that even with improvements in treatment there is still a significant advantage of detecting breast cancer with mammography before symptoms develop.”
This new study also found no benefit in mammograms for women over age 69 when it came to reducing cancer death risk.
The study was online in the journal Cancer.
shutupaboutit 
The only problem with starting to get mammograms at such an early age is having your breasts exposed to so much radiation. There’s a school of thought that the actual radiation can cause breast cancer, so it’s a catch 22. May be better to have ultrasounds?
When I was screening I alternated between the two. First I had a mammogram, 6 months later I had a breast MRI.
Landing on your blog was a (happy) accident. I was curiously (if vainly) Searching the World Wide Web (do folks still say that? HA!) for pictures of “normal” nipples to see if mine are odd, which wouldn’t surprise me one bit because I’m am quite the oddball in general. Scrolling through the ENDLESS photos of nipples of all sorts had me feeling very good about mine, then I came across a picture from your blog. It was from your “Purple Nipple Greeter” post which, let’s just be honest, REQUIRES Further investigation. I clicked the picture and the link attached and read the post, I thought it was adorable (I hope that doesn’t sound condescending at all because I certainly don’t mean it to). I don’t have any cancer or breast health issues but I really enjoyed the post so much that I read through more of your blog. I usually don’t comment too often but your story, and willingness to so openly share it, is amazing and touch and heart warming, and beautiful. You seem like such an awesomely strong and wonderful person and I just wanted to share with you that, although I am not part of your target audience, I appreciate you sharing so much of yourself. You are beautiful and inspiring and you’ve made my Sunday morning a little bit better. So thank you, and I sincerely hope that life brings you boatloads of joy.
Cheryl B.