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Many doctors would recommend mammograms to terminally ill women, even though there is almost no chance they would benefit, according to a U.S. poll

Breast cancer screening with mammography is a controversial area, with medical groups differing in their recommendations on when and how often women should be screened.

But there should be "no controversy" when it comes to women with terminal illnesses, according to the researchers on the new study, which appears in the journal Cancer.

That's because those women would have virtually no chance of benefiting from early breast cancer detection, but they would face the risks of mammography screening -- including "false-positive" results that could lead to needless worry and invasive follow-up tests.

There is also the unnecessary cost of having terminally ill women undergo mammograms, which run $100 or more.

Yet in the new study, researchers found that nearly half of U.S. primary care doctors said they would recommend mammography screening to a hypothetical patient with inoperable lung cancer.

That's despite the fact that the average life expectancy with the disease is about 10 months. What's more, if breast cancer were found in a woman with terminal lung cancer, she would probably not be eligible for treatment.

why would so many doctors recommend mammography screening to terminally ill women?

That's still not clear, according to Leach. One possibility is that uncertainty over mammography screening guidelines has something to do with it.

Those guidelines differ depending on the source. Guidelines from the ACS, for example, say that women at average risk of breast cancer should start yearly mammograms at age 40, and continue doing so as long as they are in "good health."

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, on the other hand, recommends that women get a screening mammogram every two years, between the ages of 50 and 74. And it says there is not enough evidence to know whether women age 75 and older benefit from screening, as studies have not included elderly women.

That leaves large gray areas, such as the common scenario where a woman is 65 years old and has heart disease or other major health conditions. It's unclear if she will live long enough to gain any benefit from regular mammograms.

SOURCE: Reuters