WASHINGTON — Mammograms detect few cancers in women under the age of 40 but cause expense and anxiety because women frequently get “false positives” that require follow-ups to rule out cancer, researchers reported yesterday.
Mammograms did not detect any tumors among women under the age of 25, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The report is expected to reinforce a highly controversial recommendation last fall that most women in their 40s don’t need annual mammograms.
Yesterday’s University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study examined the records of more than 117,000 women, aged 18 to 39 when they got their first mammograms starting in 1995, following them for a year to see what happened.
There were no tumors among the women under 25. For women aged 35 to 39, 12.7 per 1,000 got called back for further checks after the mammogram produced a suspicious-looking lesion. Very few of the women called back actually had a tumor.
The women, as a result, faced unnecessary expense, radiation exposure and anxiety, the researchers wrote.