Las Vegas NowDoctor, Patient Reacts to Mammogram Recommendations

Doctor, Patient Reacts to Mammogram Recommendations

Las Vegas breast cancer patients are angry and confused after a government health panel released a new recommendation encouraging women to wait until the age of 50, not 40, to start getting routine mammograms.

One local breast cancer survivor says she's only alive today because of a routine mammogram she got at the age of 40.

Christine Ghilardi-Solomon is convinced her two young children would be without their mother today if she had waited until the age of 50 to get that routine mammogram. “That mammogram saved my life. I turned 40, I went in, they found a spot, I had further testing and they found it wasn't just cancerous, it was spreading quickly,” she said.

But with aggressive treatment and chemotherapy, Christine is alive and well today. Yet new guidelines released by a government health panel now discourage routine mammograms for women under the age of 50.

The panel concludes most breast cancer occurs in older women and false positives and unnecessary biopsies are creating anxiety for women in their 40’s.

Breast cancer specialist Dr. Heather Allen doesn't believe that. “My typical day, like this morning, I saw 11 women with breast cancer and of those 11, five of them were diagnosed under the age of 50. So if anyone is thinking breast cancer doesn't occur in women under 50 they are very wrong,” she said.

Dr. Allen says a closer look at the panel's conclusions reveal that they are not based on any new research or information and she says something else strikes her as strange. “There were no oncologists and no breast surgeons on that panel, so clearly they are looking at this from more of an economic point of view than anything else,” she said.

Dr. Allen says she is still encouraging her patients to do monthly self-exams and mammograms under the age of 50 and she hopes insurance companies don't start denying mammography coverage because of this new government recommendation.