July 28th, 2011 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
No Comments »
Most women in their 40′s believe they should have annual mammograms, regardless of what screening regimen their doctor might recommend.
So say researchers in Massachusetts who surveyed women (primarily white, highly educated) ages 39-49 presenting for annual checkups. They gave the women a fact sheet about the new USPSTF guidelines on mammogram screening in their age group, and asked them to read one of two articles either supporting or opposing the guidelines. The researchers then asked women about their beliefs, concerns and attitudes about breast cancer and mammogram screening. Here’s what they found -
- Women overwhelmingly want annual mammograms – Close to 90% of women surveyed felt they should have annual mammograms, regardless of what their doctor might recommend.
- Women overestimate breast cancer risks – Eighty eight percent overestimated their lifetime risk for the disease, with the average estimate being 37%. (The correct lifetime risk for breast cancer is 12%). This is consistent with previous research on breast cancer beliefs.
- The media may not influence women’s opinions about screening guidelines – Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog That Ate Manhattan*
July 18th, 2011 by Elaine Schattner, M.D. in Opinion, Research
No Comments »
Yesterday’s post was not really about Avastin, but about medical journalism and how patients’ voices are handled by the media.
L. Husten, writing on a Forbes blog, cried that the press fawned, inappropriately, over patients’ words at the FDA hearing last week, and that led him to wonder why and if journalists should pay attention to what people with illness have to say, even if their words go against the prevailing medical wisdom.
There’s a fair amount of controversy on this. For sake of better discussion in the future, I think it best to break it up into 3 distinct but inter-related issues:
1. About health care journalism and patients’ voices:
A general problem I perceive (and part of why I started blogging) is how traditional medical journalists use patients’ stories to make a point. What some of my journalism professors tried to teach me, and most editors I’ve dealt with clearly want, is for the reporter to find a person with an illness, as a lead, and then tell about the relevant news, and provide some expert commentary – with at least one person speaking on each “side” of the issue, of course – and then end the story with some bit about the patient and the future.
I argue that this form of medical journalism Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
July 9th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in True Stories
3 Comments »
Marilyn Mann is a very smart woman. She’s a securities lawyer. But she’s also educated herself about health care out of necessity. She’s a breast cancer survivor and she has a daughter with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, a genetic disease causing very high LDL-cholesterol. She is one of the administrators of a Facebook group called Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH) Discussion Group – intended primarily for people with FH or their family members.
Recently, Mann got a message from a PR woman who had joined the Facebook page.
“Hi Marilyn,
A few months ago, I had emailed you about some research I was doing about a new treatment for FH. I am now working with a pharmaceutical company, and the company currently has a drug in development to help treat people with severe FH that may not be responding to current therapies. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
July 7th, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Health Tips, Opinion, Research
No Comments »
I read the LA Times article by Shari Roan, Study urges more individual mammogram guidelines, with interest. As Roan notes, guidelines to date have mainly focused on a woman’s age and not her other risks factors.
The American Cancer Society recommends that healthy women undergo screening mammograms every one to two years beginning at age 40 regardless of risk factors. In 2009, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended a different schedule which urged the inclusion of an individual’s personal risks: screening for women ages 40 to 49 should be based on individual risk factors and women ages 50 to 74 should be screened every two years.
Monday, a paper was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (full reference below) which argues for a more personalized approach to screening mammograms.
The study by Dr. Steven R. Cummings, senior author and senior researcher at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, and colleagues was based on a computer model comparing the lifetime costs and health benefits for women who got mammograms every year, every two years, every three to four years or never. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
July 7th, 2011 by Kenny Lin, M.D. in Research
No Comments »
Nearly forty years ago, President Richard Nixon famously declared a “War on Cancer” by signing the National Cancer Act of 1971. Like the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program that was then landing men on the Moon, and the ongoing (and eventually successful) World Health Organization-led initiative to eradicate smallpox from the face of the Earth, the “War on Cancer” was envisioned as a massive, all-out research and treatment effort. We would bomb cancer into submission with powerful regimens of chemotherapy, experts promised, or, failing that, we would invest in early detection of cancers so that they could be more easily cured at earlier stages.
It was in the spirit of the latter that the National Cancer Institute launched the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer (PLCO) Screening trial in 1992. This massive study, which eventually enrolled more than 150,000 men and women between age 55 and 74, was designed to test the widespread belief that screening and early detection of the most common cancers could improve morbidity and mortality in the long term. Not a few influential voices suggested that the many millions of dollars invested in running the trial might be better spent on programs to increase the use of these obviously-effective tests in clinical practice.
They were wrong. As of now, the PLCO study is 0-for-2. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*
