Tuesday, November 17, 2009

New Breast Cancer Screening...

Well if you know me then you know I have an opinion about this... If you're out of the loop in the news there has been a discussion about how women should not have yearly mamograms starting at age 40 but instead have every other year a mamogram at age 50. Here's the part I agree with....mamograms are not very good at detecting breast cancer in younger women. The part i think that is slightly vague and confusing is that this suggests that women need no advanced screening until age 50 or that they do not need a regular medicalk screening.
Here is why I feel that way-----When I was 21 I went to a clinic for birth control and was surprising denied because they thought my breast tissue was lumpy....which lead me to where I am now.... after meeting with a boob specialist I was instructed to get a Sonogram (yes like the one a pregnant woman gets) on my breasts. I think I had 2 sonograms before finding out at age 22 that I was BRCA 1 + (there is a 2 but i'm 1) immeadiately I had a chest x-ray, another sonogram, and my very first mamogram, but it was more of a base line thing not to detect any disease currently but to compare to future screenings. Since then I've had one other mamogram b/c some medical center refused to give me the DR recommended MRI and blood testing, which untimately led me to just remove most of my breast tissue. I, unlike a large chunk of others, will need advanced forms of screening for the rest of my life and will more than likely have undergo at least 1 more surgery but probably more than that.
In my family, there has been 3 cases of Breast cancer and they were all younger than 50, in fact one was 29. The leading cause of death in my family appears to be cancer...Get some screening!

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