Ulrika Årehed Kågström, President of the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) and Secretary General of Cancerfonden, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“A few weeks ago, Amelia Adamo and I visited this year’s Pink Ribbon designer, Karl Fredrik Gustafsson, at Eklaholm. We talked about Cancerfonden’s Pink Ribbon campaign and about the great progress of research since Amelia took the initiative to bring Pink October to Sweden more than 20 years ago.
Yesterday morning, we were sitting in Nyhetsmorgon, and Amelia told us that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. It will be a year of tough treatments, but thanks to the advances in research, the prognosis for breast cancer patients today is good.
In Sweden, we have fantastic cancer care and a world-class screening program, but it also needs to be developed. Today, all women aged 40 to 74 are offered free mammography. However, many women, like Amelia, are diagnosed later in life.
We are living longer and longer, and technological development has progressed. There is therefore reason to review whether more flexible age limits and risk-based models should be introduced, so that women with a residual risk of developing breast cancer can be invited for mammography even after the age of 74.
The National Board of Health and Welfare has solid processes for evaluating screening programs. But it is now almost three years since they last took a position on the age limits. During that time, technological development has gone at breakneck speed and created new opportunities to save lives. Therefore, the program should be reviewed again, so that no one with a continued elevated risk will have to be phased out of the screening.
The Government should give the National Board of Health and Welfare a clear mandate to modernise how screening programmes are assessed and updated. Such a modernisation should include both testing of flexible age limits and risk-based models, as well as the development and testing of AI-based methods within the regular programme – something that is already underway in Region Uppsala, based on research funded by the Swedish Cancer Society.
Modernisation should also include better use of register data to enable faster analyses and conclusions, instead of waiting for long-term studies that are often lacking in the case of, for example, age changes in the programmes.
New research results and improved methods must be able to influence the recommendations more quickly – to save more lives.”
More posts featuring Ulrika Årehed Kågström.
