Breast Self-Examinations: What’s Wrong With Them?
Most women probably remember the gynecologist saying that it’s important to conduct breast self-examinations at home once a month, or have heard the tale of how a friend or family member found a lump in their breast that wasn’t detected by a mammogram.
So the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s new recommendation against teaching women how to do breast self-examinations may seem perplexing. (The guidelines also changed regarding when women should start getting mammograms and how frequently they should receive them. Here’s the WSJ story.)
Here’s the rationale about self-exams, according the task force’s vice chair, Diana Petitti: There’s no evidence that self-exams yield significant medical benefit. Two huge studies, one conducted in Russia and the other in China, find no difference in mortality rates between those women assigned to perform breast self-examination and those who aren’t. However, in the Russian study, the breast self-examination group was more likely to find both benign and malignant tumors compared to the control group.
The American Cancer Society doesn’t recommend breast self-examinations in its early detection guidelines either, stating only that “breast self-exam is an option for women starting in their 20s.”
But not everyone in the field agrees with the task force’s recommendation. Gary Lyman of […]
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