Women should get ANNUAL breast cancer screenings, the Government’s women’s health czar claims

The women’s health czar said offering women annual breast cancer screenings could save 1,000 lives a year.

Dame Lesley Regan said the current system of screening women aged 50 to 70 every three years “is not based on scientific evidence”.

The UK’s breast cancer screening program has the longest gap between screenings in the world.

Every one to two years in the US and every two years in Europe.

Dame Lesley, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Imperial College London, claimed that the decision to give women a mammogram every three years was based on available budgets when screening was introduced in the late 1980s – but more recent studies have shown that annual checks would save lives.

‘As [someone] reported a normal mammogram today and she developed precancerous lesions next month, for example, will she wait then [until her next check]although it may have become invasive because she thinks she is doing well,” she said yesterday at the launch of the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index in London.

“If you get a mammogram every year — and I understand it’s an expensive resource — there are a lot of good studies that show how many lives you save.”

Dame Lesley said very early onset or precancerous lesions that can be detected by screening are curable.

The UK’s breast cancer screening program has the longest gap between screenings in the world. Every one to two years in the US and every two years in Europe

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She revealed that she had personally experienced “several cases” of such lesions, but was now certain that she was “going to die of something else” because they were spotted in time.

The NHS needs to be “much more innovative” in tackling breast cancer, such as using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to read mammograms, as there is a chronic shortage of radiologists, she said.

The Women’s Health Ambassador also criticized the UK’s recent record in cervical cancer prevention.

“I find it really outrageous that women get cervical cancer these days… Cervical cancer is a preventable disease. We have a vaccine that is incredibly effective and we have a screening program that we are a world leader in,” she said.

“I think the sadness lies in the fact that we now have the lowest screening utilization in the last 20 years.

“And it’s really a problem that’s going to lead to very high rates of advanced cancer by 2040 — and that’s not far off.”

Figures from the NHS show that in 2021/22 around 69.9 per cent of women aged 25 to 64 had cervical cancer tests – known as Pap smears – down slightly from 70.2 per cent the year before.

While government data shows uptake of the HPV vaccine, which prevents cervical cancer, fell by 7 per cent in girls and 8.7 per cent in boys in 2021/22 compared to the previous year.

Studies have shown that 15 percent of women put off attending cervical screening appointments because they cannot take time off from work.