New Mammogram Guidelines Could Disproportionately Endanger Black Women

In Tuesday’s What We Missed, we briefly mentioned the new USPST mammogram guidelines, which now recommend that women begin getting regular mammograms at age 50 rather than at 40, and that the frequency be reduced from annual to once every two years.
The guidelines have been criticized for being “patronizing” and “dangerous” for women’s health, but there’s one community that is put at particular risk by the guidelines but isn’t receiving as much attention: black women.
My colleague and former classmate Ashton Lattimore writes on News One that “the potential impact of these guidelines on black women is a really important piece of the puzzle that so far hasn’t gotten much discussion.”
In her piece, she interviews Dr. Marissa Weiss, a leading breast cancer specialist and founder of BreastCancer.org, who confirms that African-American women are more likely to get breast cancer than white women when they’re under age 40. (The U.S. Department of Health reports that Black women ages 35 to 44 have a breast cancer death rate more than twice that of white women in the same age group.)
The new guidelines, then, as Weiss points out, “would pass over the time of greatest risk for African-American women.”
Lattimore also points out that triple negative breast cancer – an aggressive form of cancer- disproportionately impacts Black women, and that Black women are already diagnosed with later stage breast cancers more frequently than other groups.
Looks like perhaps the only good that will come out of these guidelines is increased awareness about the importance of ignoring them completely, as well as the importance of women- especially black women- undergoing regular and early mammogram screenings.