Breast cancer screening: introduction.

摘要

In this collection of invited, peer reviewed papers on Breast Cancer Screening in Preventive Medicine, an attempt is being made to address the controversies that surfaced after the publication of the 2009 update of recommendations of the US Preventive Services Task Force on Breast Cancer Screening (US Preventive Services Task Force, 2009), together with the accompanying meta-analysis by Nelson et al. (2009) and the modeling performed by Mandelblatt et al. (2009).The main focus of the controversy was whether routine mammography screening should be recommended for women age 40-49, and whether for those screened, biennial screening was appropriate rather than annual. However, in addition, and to some extent based on other recent contributions to the literature, it is also desirable to question the systematic screening of older women, and whether such screening has realized the expectations in populations where screening programs have been introduced.