This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hello. I’m Dr Maurie Markman, from City of Hope. I’d like to briefly discuss an article with a very interesting analysis on an important topic. The title of the article is “Breast cancer screening interval: effect on rate of late-stage disease at diagnosis and overall survival,” which was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Breast cancer screening with mammograms is standard of care and has been for a very long period of time. The question that was addressed by these particular authors is whether yearly screening or biennial screening makes a difference.
They looked at their own registry data. They looked at the date of diagnosis and the history for the last mammogram before the mammogram that led to a diagnosis of cancer. Then, they made somewhat of an artificial — but reasonable — determination, and stated that if the last mammogram before the particular diagnosis was 15 months or less, this would be considered an annual screening strategy.
If they saw that the last mammogram was obtained from 15 to 27 months prior to the diagnosis of breast cancer, this would’ve been considered a biennial screening strategy. If it was greater than 27 months, the authors called this an intermittent scheduling of mammograms.
Knowing when the previous mammogram was, they looked at the percentage of late-stage cancers (defined as: A TNM stage of IIB or greater) diagnosed by the mammogram that led to the diagnosis.
Again, they looked at the population. They had a total of 8145 patients who had prediagnostic screening by mammogram. What they found was very interesting, and in my opinion, pretty powerful data.
The percentage of late-stage cancers that were diagnosed in the population of women who had what they defined as annual mammograms was 9%. If it was biennial, that percentage increased to 14%. If it was intermittent — meaning they had a mammogram, but it was more than 27 months — it increased to 19%.
We went from 9% with annual, 14% with biennial, and 19% with intermittent. This was, as you would suspect, statistically significant, providing very strong real-world evidence for the value of annual mammograms.
Not surprisingly, when they also looked at overall survival, the biennial and intermittent had worse overall survival.
Their conclusion was that this demonstrated the value of annual screening for women who were 40 years of age or older.
This is a very interesting and important analysis. It would be very interesting if other groups looked at their own data to see if they can confirm or they come up with any difference in the interpretation.
Thank you for your attention.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Hello. I’m Dr Maurie Markman, from City of Hope. I’d like to briefly discuss an article with a very interesting analysis on an important topic. The title of the article is “Breast cancer screening interval: effect on rate of late-stage disease at diagnosis and overall survival,” which was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Breast cancer screening with mammograms is standard of care and has been for a very long period of time. The question that was addressed by these particular authors is whether yearly screening or biennial screening makes a difference.
They looked at their own registry data. They looked at the date of diagnosis and the history for the last mammogram before the mammogram that led to a diagnosis of cancer. Then, they made somewhat of an artificial — but reasonable — determination, and stated that if the last mammogram before the particular diagnosis was 15 months or less, this would be considered an annual screening strategy.
If they saw that the last mammogram was obtained from 15 to 27 months prior to the diagnosis of breast cancer, this would’ve been considered a biennial screening strategy. If it was greater than 27 months, the authors called this an intermittent scheduling of mammograms.
Knowing when the previous mammogram was, they looked at the percentage of late-stage cancers (defined as: A TNM stage of IIB or greater) diagnosed by the mammogram that led to the diagnosis.
Again, they looked at the population. They had a total of 8145 patients who had prediagnostic screening by mammogram. What they found was very interesting, and in my opinion, pretty powerful data.
The percentage of late-stage cancers that were diagnosed in the population of women who had what they defined as annual mammograms was 9%. If it was biennial, that percentage increased to 14%. If it was intermittent — meaning they had a mammogram, but it was more than 27 months — it increased to 19%.
We went from 9% with annual, 14% with biennial, and 19% with intermittent. This was, as you would suspect, statistically significant, providing very strong real-world evidence for the value of annual mammograms.
Not surprisingly, when they also looked at overall survival, the biennial and intermittent had worse overall survival.
Their conclusion was that this demonstrated the value of annual screening for women who were 40 years of age or older.
This is a very interesting and important analysis. It would be very interesting if other groups looked at their own data to see if they can confirm or they come up with any difference in the interpretation.
Thank you for your attention.
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