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. Starting with the advantages, the following paragraphs will expound on 3 of the benefits of mammography screening and 3 of its shortcomings.
To begin with, the first advantage of this screening is that it reduces the mortality rate although it will be well evaluated years from now since it is hard to assess it for this one type of cancer when all cancers kill during the advanced stages. Estimated to be over 35%, mortality reduction for women in this program is higher than 15% to 30% of all receiving medical attention, with 70% outside the program. read more now about mammogram near me
The second advantage is that of improvement the chances of treating early disease which comes as a result of early detection that enhances low mastectomies number, better results from breast conservation and reduced chemotherapy.
The last advantage is that there is improved quality assurance of the diagnostic chain where promising infrastructure has been put in place so as to optimize the coordination and cooperation of different sections of diagnostic chain due to the cases of detection without subsequent assessments.
The first and most risk disadvantage is that this program exposes the woman to radiation risks and other risks seeing that with the modern methods of mammography and mammography digital techniques offer dosages of 4 mGy per breast, which however declines with age where those beyond 40 years of age have a very minimal risk 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 of this program is that it comes with a risk of over diagnosis, a case which is made real by the discovery of more cancers by the screening, which if there were no scans, would not have become apparent, a disadvantage since the screening, in such a case does not help in reducing mortality and this can be proved by a study that proved that people who undergo the mammography scan have more likelihood of having breast cancer than those who do not, when age and composition remained the same for both groups. read more now