MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Declining mammograms mean declining survival rates: Study. A new study showing decreasing rates of mammograms in women ages 40 – 49 is reinciting the debate over the importance of annual breast exams in a younger population.
Two new studies show that the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force’s (USPSTF) November 2009 recommendation that women ages 40 – 49 no longer need yearly screening for breast cancer has begun to affect the number women undergoing exams.
The USPSTF’s 18-month-old proposed guidelines suggest that women start mammography screening at age 50, rather than 40, every two years rather than annually. The recommendation was departure from two decades of recommendations from the American Cancer Society, which was one of the groups opposing the federal task force’s guidelines.
Researchers at the University of Colorado and University Hospitals at Case Medical Center both saw significant drops in the number of screenings in patients aged 40 – 49.
"These guidelines greatly concerned us, especially for our patients and primary physicians. We know that when patients are screened earlier, they have a better prognosis for detection and treatment," Case Medical Center director of breast imaging Dr. Donna Plecha said in prepared remarks.
Plecha, who will present the results of one of the studies today at the American Roentgen Ray Society annual meeting, thinks that if doctors and patients begin following the USPSTF’s guidelines, survival rates in this population will decline.
In January of this year, an analysis by researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Michigan of the USPSTF’s decision to deprioritize breast cancer screening suggested the advisory panel may have ignored evidence that more frequent mammograms save more lives. The researchers studied some of the risk models employed by the USPSTF to issue its controversial breast screening guidelines.
Report: DNA from Mass. hospital confirms bin Laden’s death. Osama bin Laden’s sister’s death from brain cancer at Mass. General Hospital in Boston allowed the U.S. to confirm the man’s identity, ABC News reported. When bin Laden’s sister died at MGH, tissue from her body was taken by government officials for DNA testing, according to the network.
Two Obama administration officials told The Associated Press today that tests show, with 99.9 percent certainty, that the body of the man believed to be bin Laden truly is him.
It would be easy to identify bin Laden with his sister’s DNA using "commonplace" polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methods, according to a blog post by the Scientific American. The piece’s author, a Cell and Molecular Biology graduate student, wrote that a body could be identified in under five hours.
In comparing hospitals, what if they’re all equal? Quality measures. Patient satisfaction surveys. With our new health care reform law, these "performance measures" are the new black in health care. Hospitals are currently spending, conservatively, tens of millions of dollars to bolster these "performance measures" in hopes of securing a refund of a mere 1 percent of payments that CMS will soon withhold from them in the name of "assuring" quality improvement. But what if, nationwide, there wasn’t a big difference in these measures between hospitals? What happens then? Might payments then be made on political grounds? asks cardiologist blogger Dr. Westby Fisher.
"Red-wine" stent aims to replicate wine’s reported cardiac benefits. The polyphenols found in red wine could eventually be used in antirestenosis compounds for drug-eluting stents, if the results of early trials in animals can be replicated in humans, reports HeartWire.
Bill Clinton warns on SCOTUS’s opinion of health care law. The U.S. Supreme Court could rule that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s "individual mandate" is unconstitutional, but on the whole the bill will stay in tact, former President William Clinton said.
"Well, I think – I guess, you know, there’s some chance, given how political it is, the courts, that they would strike down the mandatory purchase, although I find it amazing that they would I mean you can make people buy automobile liability insurance," Clinton said in an interview with CNN taped Friday, reports The Hill.