Discomfort May Deter Large Number of Women From Obtaining Mammograms

September 25, 2019 — Siemens Healthineers and national nonprofit HealthyWomen announced results from a new national survey designed to deepen understanding on how to improve women’s experiences with screening mammograms for breast cancer detection. The survey, which included responses from women over age 40 (all of whom fall under the recommended screening guidelines), revealed that while 61 percent of women said mammograms are necessary, 52 percent found them uncomfortable and 25 percent regarded them as painful.

The American College of Radiology (ACR) and the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI) both recommend that women begin receiving annual mammograms at 40. The only test shown to reduce breast cancer deaths, mammograms allow for early disease detection, which greatly improves the odds of survival and can help a patient diagnosed with breast cancer avoid more extensive treatment.

The survey, which was commissioned by Siemens Healthineers and conducted by HealthyWomen, featured responses from 1,194 women 40 and older regarding their experiences with and perceptions of mammograms.

The survey findings revealed:

Comfort is a resonating factor and is key to encouraging women to continue mammograms as recommended: Of the 124 women who stopped receiving mammograms on an annual or biannual basis (about 10 percent of respondents), 32 percent cited unpleasant and/or painful past experiences as a deterrent.
Nearly 1 in 6 women report that discomfort has deterred them from getting a mammogram as recommended: Twelve (12) percent of women reported postponing a mammogram due to discomfort, and 3 percent said they would not get them anymore because of it.
Most women are not aware of patient comfort options on mammography systems but would seek out medical practices offering more comfortable experiences: Fifty-four (54) percent of women said that they would be highly motivated to receive regular mammograms if they knew that some medical practices provide a more comfortable/tailored mammogram experience. Forty-nine (49) percent said they would be very likely to seek out practices offering more comfortable/tailored mammogram experiences.
Beyond discomfort-related concerns, radiation is also a worry for women: Of the 169 women who have not had a mammogram, nearly 16 percent reported worries about radiation as the reason.

Mammography vendors have focused recently on making improvements to their systems to enhance the patient experience. Siemens Healthineers’ Mammomat Revelation mammography system features personalized compression, soft paddles, low radiation doses and mood lighting to help improve the patient experience.

HealthyWomen posted a detailed article related to the survey findings here.

For more information: www.siemens-healthineers.com

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a Schematic of the system. The entire solid tumour is illuminated from four sides by a four-arm fibre bundle. A cylindrically focused linear array is designed to detect optoacoustic signals from the tumour. In vivo imaging is performed in conical scanning geometry by controlling the rotation and translation stages. The sensing part of the transducer array and the tumour are submerged in water to provide acoustic coupling. b Maximum intensity projections of the optoacoustic reconstruction of a phantom of polyethylene microspheres (diameter, 20 μm) dispersed in agar. The inset shows a zoomed-in view of the region boxed with a yellow dashed line. In addition, the yellow boxes are signal profiles along the x, y and z axes across the microsphere centre, as well as the corresponding full width at half-maximum values. c Normalized absorption spectra of Hb, HbO2 and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). The spectrum for the AuNPs was obtained using a USB4000 spectrometer (Ocean Optics, Dunedin, FL, USA), while the spectra for Hb and HbO2 were taken from http://omlc.org/spectra/haemoglobin/index.html. The vertical dashed lines indicate the five wavelengths used to stimulate the three absorbers: 710, 750, 780, 810 and 850 nm. Optoacoustic signals were filtered into a low-frequency band (red) and high-frequency band (green), which were used to reconstruct separate images.