Mammograms Benefit Women Up to Age 75

Breast cancer screening is effective and reduces deaths in women up to 75 years old, a Dutch study of 860,000 women ages 70 to 75 found.

Jacques Fracheboud of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, said many countries that run breast cancer screening programs offer it to women between the ages of 50 to 70. However, in 1998 in the Netherlands extended its program to women up to age 75.

The findings, presented at the sixth European Breast Cancer Conference in Berlin, suggests that age 70 is an appropriate upper age limit and saves lives without causing substantial harm by subjecting older women to over-diagnosis and over-treatment.

Fracheboud and colleagues said they found that from 2003, five years after screening was extended to women ages 70 to 75, there was a steady decline in deaths from breast cancer among women ages 75 to 79.

By 2006 breast cancer mortality was 29.5 percent lower than the average for the period 1986-1997 for this age group — a time when breast cancer mortality in women ages 75 to 79 had remained stable. In 1986 to 1997 the average was 166 deaths per 100,000 women ages 75 to 79 and in 2006 it was 117 per 100,000.