Pros and Cons of Mammography Screening

Although it has its side effects, mammography screening is a program offered at a certain cost and in intervals, and is designed for the purpose of early cancer detection which assists in lowering the rates of deaths and also improving therapeutic options. Currently, mammography screening is the only proved method to meet the needs above. The following paragraphs will discuss on three advantages of Mammography and four of its disadvantages, starting with the advantages.
Mortality reduction is the first advantage and the major goal of mammography screening but requires many years to be effective as death from all types of cancer occur during the advanced stages hence it is hard to assess it. Mortality reduction is currently estimated between 15% to 30% in a study where 70% of the women did not participate in the program and it is estimated to exceed 35% for those participating.
The other advantage of mammography screening is the improvement of the probability of early disease treatment through early detection which leads to reduced mastectomies number, reduced chemotherapy, and better results in the case of breast conservation.
Lastly, on advantages, mammography has enabled the installation of futuristic infrastructure that has been set up to improve coordination and cooperation between diagnosis disciplines which experienced a critical analysis where detection without subsequent assessments happened, something that has helped to improve the quality assurance of the diagnostic chain.
To begin on the shortcomings, the first is that mammography exposes the women to risks of radiation and other risks with the digital mammography techniques offering a dosage of 4mGy per breast, whose effect however decreases with the increase in age, as women beyond 40 years have less chances of dying due to breast cancer.
Secondly, the program, like all other medical tests, have a chance of giving out a false alarm whereby the screening detects abnormalities which are subjects to further evaluation and assessment but may turn to be benign for the second time, making the women who do not come back take the false alarm as the true results. read more now
The last disadvantage is that of over diagnosis where the mammography scan discovers additional cancers that, in some cases, may not have become apparent if there was no screening done, a double tragedy since their discovery do not reduce mortality and this can be acknowledged by the fact that breast cancer is more in people who have gone through screening than those who did not go through it, provided that their age and composition is the same. Visit this website