Mammography Dangers To Be Aware Of

While mammograpy has its' uses and benefits, it is not completely benign especially for younger women. Samuel Epstein, author of Politics of Cancer, who has been analyzing cancer for decades, provides information all women should be aware of.

Duncan


Dangers and Unreliability of Mammography: Part 1
by Samuel Epstein, MD

Contrary to popular belief and misleadingly assurances by the media, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and American Cancer Society (ACS), mammography is not a technique for early diagnosis. In fact, a breast cancer has usually been present for about eight years before it is usually detected.

Mammography poses major risks of which women still remain uninformed. Radiation from routine mammography poses cumulative risks of breast cancer. Contrary to misleading assurances that radiation exposure from mammography is trivial and similar to that from a chest X ray, about 1/1,000 of a rad (radiation-absorbed dose), the routine practice of taking four films for each breast results in some 1,000-fold greater exposure, 1 rad, focused on each breast rather than the entire chest. Thus, premenopausal women screened annually over ten years are exposed to about 10 rads for each breast.

The premenopausal breast is also highly sensitive to radiation with each rad exposure increasing breast cancer risk by 1 percent, resulting in a cumulative 10 percent increased risk over ten years of screening; risks are still greater for "baseline" screening at younger ages, for which there is no evidence of future relevance. Furthermore, cancer risks are up to fourfold greater for the 2 percent of women who are unknowing carriers of the A-T gene, and thus highly sensitive to radiation; estimatedly, this accounts for 20 percent of breast cancers annually.

Click link for more:

http://www.newliving.com/issues/apr_2005/articles/mammography.html

Here is a link to a much more complete though more difficult essay by Epstein on mammography dangers:

http://www.preventcancer.com/patients/mammography/ijhs_mammography.htm