Women should get ANNUAL breast cancer scans, says government women’s health czar

Offering women annual breast cancer screenings could save 1,000 lives a year, the women’s health czar has said.

Dame Lesley Regan said the current system of screening women aged 50 to 70 once every three years “is not based on scientific evidence”.

The UK’s breast screening program has the longest gap between screens in the world.

In the United States it is every one or two years and in Europe every two years.

Dame Lesley, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Imperial College London, said the decision to give women mammograms once every three years was based on the budgets available at the time screening was introduced. in the late 1980s, but more recent studies showed that annual checkups would save lives.

‘Yes [someone] you have a mammogram that is reported as normal today and you developed, for example, a precancerous lesion next month, then you will be waiting [until her next check]when it might as well have become invasive, in the belief that she is fine,’ he said at the launch of the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index in London yesterday.

“If you get an annual mammogram, and I appreciate that it’s an expensive resource, there are some really good studies showing how many lives you save.”

Dame Lesley said that precancerous or very early-onset lesions, which can be detected by screening, were curable.

The UK’s breast screening program has the longest gap between screens in the world. In the USA it is every one or two years and in Europe every two years

She revealed that she had personally experienced ‘several cases’ of such injuries, but was now confident that she would ‘die of something else’ because they had been caught early.

The NHS needed to be “much more innovative” in tackling breast cancer, such as using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to read mammograms, as there was a chronic shortage of radiologists, he said.

The women’s health ambassador also criticized the UK’s recent record on preventing cervical cancer.

‘I really think it’s shameful that women have cervical cancer in this day and age… Cervical cancer is a preventable disease. We have a vaccine, which is incredibly effective, and we have a screening program that we are leading the world on,” she said.

“The sadness, I think, is in the fact that we now have the lowest acceptance of projections in the last 20 years.

“And that’s really a problem that translates to a lot of advanced cancers by 2040, which is not that far off.”

Figures from the NHS show that around 69.9 per cent of women aged 25-64 attended cervical cancer checks, also called smear tests, in 2021/22, a slight decrease from 70.2 percent of the previous year.

While government data shows uptake of the HPV vaccine, which prevents cervical cancer, fell by 7% for girls and 8.7% for boys in 2021/22 compared to with the previous year.

Studies have shown that 15 percent of women put off going to cervical screening appointments because they can’t take time off work.