CDC: Cancer-Screening Rates Fall Short of Goals
U.S. cancer-screening rates are falling short of the government’s targets.
According to new stats out today from the CDC, not enough people are following the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s recommendations for getting regular breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening tests. And the picture looks even worse when you look at specific racial and ethnic groups, namely Asians and Hispanics.
Keep in mind that the USPSTF’s recommendations are generally more conservative than those from other organizations. So, for example, these stats look at how many women aged 50 to 74 years get a mammogram every two years — even though other groups recommend starting screening earlier and screening every year.
The new figures, which are published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, show that the breast-cancer screening rate was 72.4% in 2010, short of the government’s Healthy People 2020 target of 81.1%. The cervical-cancer screening rate was 83%, compared to the target of 93%, and the colorectal-cancer screening rate was 58.6%, short of the 70.5% goal.
Screening for all three diseases was more common among whites and blacks than Asians. Only 64.1% of Asian women had their recommended mammogram, for example, compared to 72.8% of whites, 73.2% of blacks and 69.7% of […]
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