Alberta lowers recommended age for breast cancer screening to 45

Alberta Health Services has lowered the recommended age for breast cancer screening. The health authority now says women should begin screening every two years starting at age 45, instead of age 50.

The decision was based on guidelines from the Alberta Breast Cancer Screening Clinical Practice Guideline Committee.

Alberta is the first province in the country to make the change.

“When we weighed the harm versus the benefit and the cost effectiveness, it was shown that screening starting at age 45 and every two years until the age of 74 had the most benefit with the least harms and was the most cost effective,” Dr.Lisa Stevenson, co-chair of Alberta Breast Screening Practice Guidelines, told CTV News Edmonton.

“We think even in the first year of doing this we’re going to save an additional nine lives.”

AHS says lowering the recommended screening age would see about 12,000 additional mammograms performed each year, adding that 240 women between the ages of 45 and 49 were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018.

“In Alberta we’re saying that a woman has a risk of one in seven of getting breast cancer in their lifetime. We used to quote the number as one in eight,” Stevenson said.

“One in 35 will die of breast cancer.”

Stevenson says mammograms will be available to women in the affected age group without a requisition from a doctor.

“This takes down that little bit of a barrier where women, even if they don’t have a doctor, or they have a doctor and they don’t feel comfortable speaking with them, or they want to do this on their own, they will be offered that opportunity at age 45 to go and have a mammogram without a requisition.”

The guidelines are for women of average risk, which Stevenson says is 80 to 85 per cent of women in Alberta.

Women who are of higher risk of breast cancer should speak to their primary care providers about screening more regularly.

The updated guidelines are available online.