Older women may not need annual mammogram

Every other year may be enough for women older than 50 to have a mammogram, researchers have found.

A study of nearly 8,000 women showed that those who let two years slip in between mammograms were no more likely to have advanced cancer if they did develop a tumor than women who had yearly mammograms.

But in women in their 40s, when cancer may be more aggressive, there was a higher risk that when a tumor was detected it would already be at an advanced stage.

“Mammography screening may reduce breast cancer mortality by detecting cancers at an earlier stage,” Emily White of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the Dec. 15 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

They studied women to see if those who only had mammograms every other year were more likely to have advanced cancer when diagnosed. They compared 2,440 women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer after a two-year interval between mammograms with 5,400 women diagnosed with breast cancer after a yearly scan.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends mammograms every one to two years, while the American Cancer Society recommends every year.