For the 23 million U.S. women who get mammograms each year, there is an increasingly urgent question: digital or film?
Interest is growing in the digital version of the breast-cancer screening test, driven in part by a study last fall in the New England Journal of Medicine that said digital was better for some women. The findings quickly became a marketing tool for makers of digital-mammography machines and hospitals that have them. Sales of the machines have been rising, with one major manufacturer citing digital equipment as the driving force behind record second-quarter revenue.
But some hospitals and doctors are concerned that the advantages of digital are being overestimated and may be causing women to delay getting a mammogram until digital machines arrive in their area. Still only about 11% of the 8,800 U.S. mammography facilities are estimated to have digital.
The advice from doctors: Don’t wait, especially if you are in one of the groups for whom digital has no demonstrated advantages. The study found that digital was better at detecting cancer only for premenopausal women, those under 50 years old, or those who have dense breasts. The majority of women who get mammograms are over 50, and looking at the 40,000 women in the study as a whole, the new technology was found to be no better than film overall.