Screening mammography

Abstract

Screening mammography can reduce mortality from breast cancer and is the only means of detecting nonpalpable cancers that are often more curable. Based on this, guidelines have evolved but compliance with them has been slow. Reservations are based on yield-cost-benefit-harm considerations, but uniformed and/or disadvantaged women and reluctance if not resistance to screening mammography by primary care physicians are major problems. The challenges are to overcome these obstacles and to obtain sufficient competent personnel and facilities to make reproducibly optimum screening mammography, which is accurately interpreted, widely available to all eligible women at the lowest possible cost.