Thousands of people have signed a petition calling on the federal government to reject new guidelines for breast cancer screening.
“All Canadians should be outraged by these guidelines,” reads the petition, which has garnered more than 6,000 signatures in five days.
The new guidelines were released last month by the Canadian Task Force on Preventative Health Care. They relax previous suggestions of regular mammography screenings in favour of recommending that women aged 40 and 74 talk to their doctor about screening options. Another recommendation states that doctors should not advise their patients to self-examine their breasts to screen for cancer.
Read more on this story from CTV Ottawa
Some of the recommendations have caught the attention of breast cancer patient advocates, who say they will result in some cancer diagnoses being made later than they would have been under the previous guidelines, potentially contributing to hundreds of deaths in Canada every year.
Rebecca Hollingsworth was diagnosed with cancer two years ago and believes she would be in a “very different situation” if she had not been told to self-examine her breasts.
“A lot of it does not make sense. I think it’s very dangerous,” she told CTV Ottawa.
“Many of the suggestions they’ve prevented are very dangerous, and I really do believe they will cost women – and some men – their lives.”
Hollingsworth started expressing her concerns on Facebook. She soon found that there were many women thinking along similar lines, and helped launch the petition.
“No one is completely safe from cancer, so I think everyone sort of at some point has in the back of their mind that ‘It could be me,’” Hollingsworth said.
Also raising issues with the new guidelines is Elizabeth Barnes, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last June. Barnes says cancer is more likely to develop in dense breast tissue, and says this information is “glaringly absent” from the guidelines.
“A lot of women are going to be left behind,” she said.
Barnes would like to see new guidelines call for all women over the age of 40 to be screened for mammograms every year, and for self-examinations to be promoted by doctors.
“Twenty years down the line, 30 years down the line when women aren’t being told to do self-exams, many cancers are going to be missed,” she said.
Breast imaging specialists have also called on the federal government to reject the guidelines. Dr. Jean Seely, the head of breast imaging at the Ottawa Hospital, told CTV Ottawa that she expects the new guidelines to “result in probably over 400 lives lost every year due to breast cancer.”
Task force co-chair Dr. Ainsley Moore disputes that claim, saying she doesn’t understand how Seely arrived at that number. Moore says critics of the new guidelines may not be taking into account women being put at risk by the screening procedures.
“I think the issue of harms is being lost in some of the discussion,” she said.
“You’re thinking ‘Oh, screening is a good thing, it’s going to catch everything, it’s going to save lives – but there [are] real harms associated with screening.”
The task force found that more than 29 per cent of women in their 40s screened over a seven-year period received false positives, leading to 43 unnecessary and invasive biopsies.
In other cases, Moore has said, screenings can flag cancers that grow so slowly they would never present a serious health risk, potentially leading to overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
