By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
TUESDAY, June 3, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Starting breast cancer screening in women’s early 40s will save more lives, a new study argues.
Nearly 3 in 4 women (73%) in their 40s find out they have breast cancer only after they’ve developed symptoms, researchers reported May 30 in the journal Radiology: Imaging Cancer.
These women are less likely to survive compared to those whose breast cancer is caught early through screening methods like mammography, researchers say.
For example, the odds that they have advanced, harder-to-treat breast cancer is more than six times higher, the study shows.
“The patients whose breast cancers were detected because of symptoms had a 63% higher likelihood of dying,” lead researcher Dr. Jean Seely said in a news release. She’s a professor of radiology at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
The study comes as the U.S. and Canada have been reassessing when it would be best for a woman to start receiving regular mammograms.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force last year updated its guidelines to recommend breast cancer screening every two years in women 40 to 75.
Likewise, the American Cancer Society now recommends that women aged 45 to 54 get mammograms every year, with women in their early 40s having the option to start screening if they want.
However, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care continues to recommend that women start screening at age 50.
This impacts how long Canadian women might carry breast cancer before it’s detected, Seely said.
“I observed a marked difference in the way breast cancers were being detected in my clinical practice,” she said. “I noted that many women under the age of 50 and older than 75 were diagnosed because of symptomatic presentation.”
For the study, researchers tracked the progress of 821 women 40 and older diagnosed with breast cancer at The Ottawa Hospital in 2016.
Of those patients, 50% had their breast cancer diagnosed as the result of a symptom rather than being caught early by a mammogram. Symptoms included a palpable lump, skin or nipple changes, concerning nipple discharge, swollen lymph nodes and breast pain.
Breast cancers detected by symptoms rather than screening were more frequent in women’s 40s, representing 73% of cases, researchers found.
Likewise, about 70% of women older than 75 found out they had breast cancer after developing symptoms, rather than through screening.
Deaths were higher among patients who didn’t get their breast cancer caught early through screening, researchers reported.
“Within only 6.7 years of follow-up, almost 20% of the 821 breast cancer patients had died, half of them from breast cancer,” Seely said.
Women who’d developed symptoms from their breast cancer were 6.6 times more likely to have an advanced cancer, and 2.2 times more likely to need a mastectomy as part of their treatment, researchers found.
“The results of this study will likely support the move to reduce the breast cancer screening age to 40 in the U.S. and Canada,” Seely said. “We have lowered the screening age in many provincial and territorial screening programs in Canada and are aiming to establish a single national policy for screening.”
More information
The American Cancer Society has more on breast cancer screening.
SOURCES: Radiological Society of North America, news release, May 30, 2025; Radiology: Imaging Cancer, May 30, 2025
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