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Saving Your Life from Breast Cancer: But It Takes Time Why You Have To Stick with Mammograms

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Saving your life against cancer takes time, it's not just a one step cures all plan. This is why you have to keep getting mammograms on a regular basis, and just one mammographic test is not as is not as accurate as having a series of tests. Breast cancer begins with a single cancer cell. Because of this small cancers (very very small cancers) are unlikely to cause the death of a patient, and larger, more persistent cluster of cancer cells cause increased patient mortality. The cancer has to reach a certain size before we have ability to see it on mammogram. Every trial in the world that has ever been done shows that mammograms save lives: after ten or 20 or 30 years of screening. In the first 5 years that you get mammograms, like the group is not going to show prevention of mortality: it takes time for a population of women to have lives saved with mammograms. Mammography is a screening test: it is meant to sort a group of women that will get more evaluation. By definition, the group will include those very likely to have disease as those somewhat likely to have the disease, and it will exclude those patients very unlikely to have disease. Thus, the bar has been set to capture almost all the cancers, miss very few (BUT MISS SOME CANCERS) and capture some normal women who may have appeared likely to have disease but who did not. Mammography testing guidelines have been improved, and the technologies have improved, and they should continue to improve. Until we find the prevention for the disease of breast cancer we have to continue to support getting regular mammogram screening as an excellent long term strategy to save your life.
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