Recently, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) rocked the medical community by instituting guidelines that would make it more difficult to diagnose breast cancer while it is easiest to treat. Instead of advising women to start yearly mammogram screenings at age 40, they asserted that women could wait until age 50 and only get a mammogram every two years until age 74. If these guidelines become officially established, they would allow insurance companies to stop covering mammograms for women under the age of 50, making them virtually unattainable for millions of women.

The connection between mammogram screenings and survival rates has been evaluated in multiple studies, and most have demonstrated that early mammogram screenings save lives. Detecting cancer in its early stages enables doctors to treat it more effectively. According to Dr. John West, Director of Surgery at Breastlink, women who start regular cancer screenings at age 40 are 20-60 percent more likely to survive than women who delay screenings until a later age. Additionally, in a study published by the National Institutes of Health that followed a group of women in their 40’s over a three-year period who were screened yearly, 20 percent of them ended up receiving a breast cancer diagnosis, and over half of these were invasive.

Another benefit to initiating mammogram screenings at the age of 40 is to give physicians the opportunity to see changes in a woman’s breast tissue over time. This can also help lead to finding breast cancer in earlier stages. A report in UPI states that deaths from breast cancer would fall 40 percent with annual screenings beginning at age 40 and continuing to age 84.