Study describes successful intervention to decrease breast cancer screening anxiety.
Recent American Cancer Society (ACS) breast cancer screening guidelines consider the anxiety created by false-positive mammography an "important but not critical outcome" when deciding who should be screened. In other words, in these guidelines, the chance that mammography will create needless cancer worry is a light thumb on the scale against breast cancer screening in some populations. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology describes a successful intervention to decrease this anxiety, lessening this barrier to screening. The study reports that after attending a public informational talk by a trained radiologist speaking about the logistics and outcomes of mammography, 117 participants scored a mean of "4" on a scale from 1-5 describing decreased screening anxiety.
"Our question was, if the ACS - and before them the U.S. Preventative Task Force - considered anxiety a harm that could prevent screening, how could we minimize that harm," says Lara Hardesty, MD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and associate professor of Radiology-Diagnostics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, one of the paper's co-authors.