Women should get ANNUAL breast cancer scans, claims Government's women's health ... trends now
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Offering women annual breast cancer checks could save 1,000 lives a year, the women's health tsar has said.
Dame Lesley Regan said the current system of screening women aged 50 to 70 once every three years was 'not based on scientific evidence'.
The UK's breast screening programme has the longest gap between screens in the world.
In the US it is every one or two years and in Europe every two years.
Dame Lesley Regan said the current system of screening women aged 50 to 70 once every three years was 'not based on scientific evidence'
Dame Lesley, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Imperial College, London, claimed the decision to give women mammograms once every three years had been based on available budgets at the time screening was introduced in the late 1980s — but more recent studies showed yearly checks would save lives.
'If [someone] has a mammogram which is reported as normal today and she developed, for example, a precancerous lesion next month, she will then be waiting [until her next check], when it may well have become invasive, in the belief that she's fine,' she told the launch of the Hologic Global Women's Health Index in London yesterday.
'If you have yearly mammography - and I appreciate that's an expensive resource - there are very good studies demonstrating how many lives you save.'
Dame Lesley said very early onset or pre-cancerous lesions, which can be detected by screening, were curable.
The UK's breast screening programme has the longest gap between screens in the world. In the US it is every one or two years and in Europe every two years
She revealed she had personally experienced 'several
