Posted on 07/13/2008 12:59:10 PM PDT by neverdem
As with most cancers, the risk of breast cancer increases with age. Yet while doctors tell women to have annual mammograms after age 40, they often advise 85-year-olds to go two or even three years between scans.
The problem, doctors say, is too little data. Large clinical trials, including those that have found that mammography saves lives, tend to focus on younger people and exclude the very old.
A recent study that tried to assess the usefulness of mammography among 80- and 90-year-olds found that very few women in this age group, 22 percent, underwent regular screenings for breast cancer, but that those who did were more likely to find the cancer early enough to avoid a mastectomy and survive at least five years.
The finding is important, because the population of very old people is rising sharply, with a fourfold rise expected by 2050. According to the National Institute on Aging, two-thirds of those over 85 are women.
But the study may raise more questions than it answers. Some experts dispute any suggestion that all elderly women should have annual mammograms — an idea that raises the specter of frail women being dragged from nursing home beds to be screened for cancer when they are far more likely to die of heart disease or complications from a broken hip.
“It gets back to the question: What is the goal of preventive care in the elderly?” said Dr...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I wonder when I discover that I just accessed the entire article why do they write in the marginal information This Article
Abstract FREE?
How long will it be before a DNA test at birth is purported to pinpoint a “likelihood” of serious diseases (i.e., the ones that cost the insurance companies the most); and what sorts of propositions will be injected into the public mind upon the availability of such “information?”
Pandemic mutations in bird flu revealed
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Nevermind a DNA test at birth and what will be injected into the public mind--how soon will it be before there is a DNA test at six months gestation and what poisons will be mandated to be injected into private wombs?
Here comes die ubermensch.
Exactly.
There is another issue that is not being discussed here that has a bearing on the case.
Elderly women often have a much different kind of cancer than younger women. They have a very slow growing cancer, that usually doesnot kill them. And those women who did not make the five year survival rate, well what did they die of? Was it cancer? or something else.
True Also an elderly woman (they use the age of 85) is much more prone to die from the surgerical complications than a younger woman. Treatment for the cancer just might hasten her death instead of prolong her life.
what would you propose we do about it?
Keep exposing every step toward this slippery slope.
Remind people of where such information has led in the past.
And above all, mega remedial catechesis on the Fifth Commandment!
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