Thank you Linda 
yes why do they stop the screening at 70 if there is a high risk ? shouldnât have to ask to be put on the screening programme
mekalar-- i suppose its a matter of money. Its not a bottomless pot.
somewhere in america they told the residents how much money there was available for free healthcare and got them to vote how that should be spent( care for the elderly, baby incubators, cancer treatment etc)Apparantly it worked well.
I wonder what would happen in the uk and we had to vote how the budget was split between research on new cures for stage 4 cancers, treatment for young women with families or screening the over 70âs?? sounds callous but I suppose that is what someone in an office somewhere has to decide.
There are reports in the news lately that pensioners get second rate treatment. Long delays for ops, getting new surgeons rather than consultants etc.
mmmmâŠWhat about the scores of Stage 4 women who are also young, with familiesâŠ? Sometimes boxes are not as clear cut as they seem.
Hi mekalar,
According to the NHS Breast Cancer Screening Programme Mammogram screening doesnt stop at 70 ,although women over 70 are not routinely invited for breast screening, they are encouraged to call the local unit to request breast screening every three years.
The leaflet below tells women over 70 that they are entitled to request breast screening every three years still if they want to continue with regular breast screening.
cancerscreening.nhs.uk/breastscreen/publications/l-02.html
Linda x
well i will be over 70 when my tamxifan stops,presumably they stop the annual scans then if you are still clear. I wonder if I will request screening or go back to being an ostrich and ignore it all?
Hi OAL,
Im not sure if all hospitals are the same but my hospital has already told me that i will be screened for life now, even after the age of 70 when other people are not routinely called to attend.
Linda
they have not said anything about future screening, I suspect they thought I already had a lot to take in. I know that when the nurse mentioned that as well as my invasive beastie i had lots of high grade LIS and that they would be screening me to keep an eye on that, but I thought the tomaxifan got rid of LIS.
mind you the nurse was not all that bright, she also told me that one of the side effects was cancer of the womb, if she had read my notes she would have noticed that i had had hysterectomy.
I know they donât routinely screen young women, because they apparently have more fat in their breasts, and itâs difficult to get a clear image from mammograms, so I wonder if there is a technical problem in screening women over 70 years old?. If there is no medical/technical justification for not sreeening older women, and itâs just down to cost, then that is discriminatory isnât it?
Im not realy sure why routine invitations for breast screening stops at age 70 though i think this is extending to 73 shortly? though apparently all women after 70 are still encouraged to continue and can self refer every 3 years for a free mammogram screening on the NHS.
Just found this on Southhamptom NHS about some of the reasons behind screening over age 70.
Screening for women over 70
"Although women over 70 are not routinely invited for breast screening, they are encouraged to request breast screening every three years as the risk of getting breast cancer does not decrease with age.
Women over 70 arenât invited for screening because we have to follow the advice of the UK National Screening Committee about who we screen regularly. The Southampton Breast Imaging Unit is already responsible for screening 75,000 women between the ages of 50 and 70. Women above the age range can refer themselves for free breast screening every three years.
The criteria for offering any organised population-wide screening programme is based on the evidence, not just relating to the benefits of the screen, but also the harms. The harms include increased anxiety and having tests and operations for an appearance that turns out to be normal or slow-growing. Some women have other illnesses which means that they will not benefit from an earlier diagnosis of their breast cancer."
Presume this explanation would be simular for all PCTs.
Good that you can still self refer every 3 yrs for free though,though how many women do? i know my mum hasnt gone for screening since her last Mammo at 70 even though im always nagging at her to go and get checked out.
Linda
Thank you cornishgirl. I have looked at the National Screening Committee website, and it appears women over the age of 70 years old still have a right to a mammogram, and they are going to extend automatic invitations to take part to 73 years old - but I oouldnât find any explanation as to why women over the age of 70 years old are no longer routinely invited to screening (surely if older women still have a right to a mammogram, it must have some benefit).
The website is quite interesting, because I always thought the screening programme was about the early detecting of illnesses, but they say their primary function is prevention by changing behaviours. In other words, the sreening programme enables them to reach healthy people, and raise awareness/educate them about risk factors, and change behaviours (this is what they claim, but I can never remember being educated during a mammogram). Maybe therefore, they think older women are less likely to change behaviour, or a change in lifestyle would be too late to have ay effect.
Thanks Linda ⊠Iâll still be under 50 JUST when my 5 years is up ⊠God willing I make it that far, I was told all being well I will have regular 3 yearly checks after that, whereas if id not had a diag I would be waiting until 50 - 53 in this area
Hi All,
Thats odd isnt it ,i too always thought the screening program was about early detection,and not education,i wasnt in the screening program when DX as was only 47 ,but ive just asked my mum and she says she was definately never educated about lifestyle or anything else for that matter just had the mammos and told results would be sent through in a few weeks!
I recently got my first call up for national screening a few weeks back and wasnt sure what to do about it, so rang my breast clinic in the end and they said not to attend and cancelled it for me as apparently i will still have all my mammos every 2 yrs for a tottal of 10yrs with them,im 4 yrs from DX at the moment.
Certainly is interesting isnt it, wonder just how many ladies who attend screening actualy do get educated while they are there? these mobile units always seem so busy with ladies in and out doubt there is much time !
Linda
Hi Linda your right I donât think we get educated as such no, for me having a mammo two years ago because of a scare it certainly made me very breast aware and at that time my SIL was diagnosed with HER2 pos which had gone to her nodes & seeing what she was going through made me determind to examine myself regular every month without fail I know without that experience Id have never found mine as tiny as I did, but then women being called for a routine check that get a clean bill of health ⊠Do they bother ? or does the experience make them more aware ?
But no they definately donât educate you about self examination. They should really, even if its in a booklet form.
Hi all.
Bit off topic ,but wondered if anyone else had seen this artical today about a recent study conducted on Milk Fat and tumor formation, metastasis , and SEs of chemo ,this study has only be done in mice so far but still interesting i think,i read about this study on pubmed a couple of weeks back also.
âSun et al. set out to discover if feeding bovine milk butter fat to mice would have any effect on tumor formation, metastasis and the side effects of paclitaxel, a chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. The authors cited previous studies that had found anti-cancer compounds in milk fatty acids and the reduced risk of mammary tumors for mice fed an anhydrous milk fat (AMF) diet. Therefore, they took 48 female Balb/c mice, a common laboratory strain, and fed them either a control diet with soybean oil as the fat or a milk fat diet, which substituted AMF for the oil, keeping the percentage fat the same for both diets. After two weeks, the mice were injected with either breast or colon cancer cells derived from Balb/c cultured cell lines.â
promega.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/milk-fat-does-a-body-good/
This is the study on published on Pubmed.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21739249
Linda
Cornishgirl what an interesting study. Donât know how reliable it is, since it was a very small study, and performed on mice, but it completely contradicts the view that milk makes cancer worse.
Coincidentally, I recently asked for information from DEFRA about oestrogen in milk. I explained why I was concerned, and asked whether it is true that there is a high level of oestrogen in milk due to cows being milked while pregnant. They said, (1) British farmers are not allowed to feed cows hormones, like growth stimulators (2) Cows are not milked beyond the second trimester, so oestrogen never reaches its peak (3) milk from pregnant cows is mixed with milk from non-pregnant cows, so the oestrogen is levelled out (4) most of the oestrogen is contained in milk fat, so that skimmed milk contains hardly any oestrogen.
Just thought this might be of interest.
Thanks Lemongrove that is interesting and it is also very good to know, i think sometimes when Milk is portrayed everywhere as a no no for BC on the web that people often get very worried unnessasarily and dont often realise that Milk contains essential nutrients as well as fatty acids and other food factors which has reported anti-cancer potential.
The study i linked to above was quite small and only in mice as you say so would need to be replicated in humans,but i thought it quite interesting especialy after the review of the meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies re Dairy/Milk products and BC which also found that Dairy and Milk may infact be associated with a reduced risk of breast cancer.
Thanks for shareing that info from DEFRA ,hopefully more studies on Dairy/Milk and its possible anti-cancer potential are currently underway.
Linda
Well, the thread title, from what Iâve read, is only partly true.
It might not always be effective without some help, but targetting the immune system is a major focus in treatment research.
One of the most promising fields is in immune therapy for HER2 cancer. It is by manipulating immunity and sensitising it that such amazing results are achieved. Looks like itâs finally coming our way after phase 3 trials in the US.
ukmi.nhs.uk/applications/ndo/record_view_open.asp?newDrugID=5337
Hereâs what CRUK are up to with the immune system
search.cancerresearchuk.org/search/results.jsp?siteid=0&query=immunotherapy&go.x=0&go.y=0
From my understanding (which could be very wrong lol) is the title is referring to those that say that a faulty immune system is responsible for cancer and can help fight cancer through diet and lifestyle changes but this is not the case as the immune system doesnât recognise cancer cells
" Cancer immunotherapy is the use of the immune system to reject cancer. The main premise is stimulating the patientâs immune system to attack the malignant tumor cells that are responsible for the disease. This can be either through immunization of the patient (e.g., by administering a cancer vaccine, such as Dendreonâs Provenge), in which case the patientâs own immune system is trained to recognize tumor cells as targets to be destroyed, or through the administration of therapeutic antibodies as drugs, in which case the patientâs immune system is recruited to destroy tumor cells by the therapeutic antibodies. Cell based immunotherapy is another major entity of cancer immunotherapy. This involves immune cells such as the Natural killer Cells (NK cells), Lymphokine Activated killer cell(LAK), Cytotoxic T Lymphocytes(CTLs), Dendritic Cells (DC), etc., which are either activated in vivo by administering certain cytokines such as Interleukins or they are isolated, enriched and transfused to the patient to fight against cancer.
Since the immune system responds to the environmental factors it encounters on the basis of discrimination between self and non-self, many kinds of tumor cells that arise as a result of the onset of cancer are more or less tolerated by the patientâs own immune system since the tumor cells are essentially the patientâs own cells that are growing, dividing and spreading without proper regulatory control"
The immune therapy does look very promising doesnât it.Lets hope itâs not too long before trials are started in the UK.
Melxx
Hi Linda Lemongrove & xwelcomes, Linda that report was really interesting & yes contradicts all that has been said about milk ! even though a small study still very interesting ⊠I wonder how with this in mind how the estrogen levels would pan out in other dairy produce and again the difference between âhigher riskâ to those who not had breast cancer to those who have cancer in them ?
xwelcomesx I particually found that report interesting it does seem the USA are steps ahead than us with all the research & a shame those in the medical secture of our goverment are not really addressing what the USA seem to be digging up continuosly ⊠this country really needs to wake up & smell the coffee
Mekala x
Good point Mel yes it does seem very promising