Study: Black women should start breast cancer screening at age 42
Breast cancer is slightly less prevalent among Black women in the U.S. compared to white women. But they have a 40% higher risk of dying due to early-onset breast cancer.
For many years, there’s been considerable debate about the best age for women to initiate breast cancer screening.The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women start getting screenings around age 50, while groups such as the American Cancer Society recommend screenings begin at an earlier age. Now a large new study suggests that if Black women begin screening for breast cancer at age 42, that could help lower racial disparities in breast cancer deaths.
Breast cancer is slightly less prevalent among Black women in the U.S. compared to white women. But they have a 40% higher risk of dying due to early-onset breast cancer. For that reason, “the current one-size-fits-all policy to screen the entire female population from a certain age may be neither fair nor equitable nor optimal,” researchers write in the study published in JAMA Network Open.
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