Reply to Callback Mammogram - how panicked should I be on a scale of 1-10?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Something like 50% of women under 50 or mid 50s get called back. It's really horrible. In fact, some reputable experts advise less frequent screening mammograms in healthy women with no family history or other risk factors because of that.[/quote]

This. We moved to Europe and my new doctor was shocked to hear I was having annual mammograms starting at 40 with no family history. Definitely not the standard here.

[/quote]

The thing is, most women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history. I am one of them. So I now advocate for regular mammograms starting at 40. If caught early, you might not need extensive surgery, or chemo.

That being said, callbacks are almost always nothing so OP is probably just fine.[/quote]

Yes but unnecessary biopsies lead to both stress and can also lead to scar tissue that can make it harder to read future mammograms so it is totally reasonable to wait. Also it is not really clear that catching breast cancer early makes it less likely to kill you. And you can also end up treating cancer that definitely won't kill you. I say all of this as someone who had a lumpectomy for DCIS. But I don't really think of it as a "thank god they caught that early" situation, I think of it as more of a "I'll never know if that was a totally waste or live saving".[/quote]

The ‘possibly life saving’ aspect is worth it to me. Doctors have no way of predicting which cases of DCIS will turn into invasive cancer and which ones will not. Would you rather find out once it has broken out of the ducts and invaded other tissue and possibly lymph nodes? That makes no sense to me. [/quote]

I had the surgery so clearly I did not decide to roll the dice. But I did decline to get radiation. The risks/side effects didn't seem worth the small reduction in risk of recurrence and no survival benefit [/quote]

I didn’t realize there was no survival benefit with radiation.[/quote]

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