Screening for breast cancer with mammography.

Mammography is generally accepted as a useful problem-solving clinical tool in characterizing known breast lesions, so that appropriate and timely treatment can be given. However, it remains grossly underutilized at what it does best: screening. The major strengths of mammography are a) its ability to detect breast cancer at a smaller, potentially more curable stage than any other examination, and b) its proved efficacy in reducing breast cancer mortality in asymptomatic women aged 40-74. If, as has recently been estimated, screening with mammography and physical examination can be expected to lower breast cancer deaths by 40%-50% among those actually examined (13), then the lives of almost 20,000 U.S. women might be saved each year if screening were to become very widely used. The challenges of the next decade are clear, to mount much more effective campaigns to educate physicians and lay women about the life-saving benefits of breast cancer screening, to devise increasingly effective and lower cost screening strategies, to further improve the current high quality of mammographic imaging despite its increasing proliferation, and to train large numbers of breast imaging specialists to guarantee that the growing case load of screening and problem-solving mammograms is interpreted with a very high level of skill.