In November, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a nongovernmental advisory panel of health experts, recommended that routine mammography for breast cancer screening start at age 50, not 40. It met with a chorus of objections. Lisa Schwartz, a general internist at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Lebanon, N.H., investigates such public health issues. She spoke recently with Science News biomedical writer Nathan Seppa. Were you surprised at the outcry that arose from this recommendation? Yes and no. This happened in 1997 when a National Institutes of Health consensus panel recommended that women in their 40s decide for themselves about mammography: an intensely negative public and political reaction. But I also hoped that with the growing acknowledgment of the harms of mammography — in medical journals, in the news and by the head of the Americ...
Alexandra Howell
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