Family Life

10.07.09 | FL News Team

Seventy-five-percent of women who die of breast cancer never had a mammogram. That's the frightening discovery of researchers at Cambridge Hospital Breast Center in Massachusetts. Researchers say only 25-percent of women studied who died of the disease had received more than one mammogram. In findings to be presented later this week at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, scientists say "women who are in screening programs have just a four-point-seven-percent mortality rate. Women who are not screened have a 56-percent mortality rate from breast cancer." They say that 56-percent rate is the same as the overall mortality rate seen up to 1970, before mammography screening was available virtually everywhere.

For the study, nearly seven-thousand Massachusetts breast cancer patients were studied. Some had gotten regular mammograms and some had not between 1990 and 1999. The patients were followed through 2007. At the end of that time, 461 of the women had died of breast cancer. Nearly 75 percent were in the group that had not had regular mammogram screenings. Worldwide, breast cancer kills more than 400-thousand women each year.