By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO |
Thu Jan 3, 2013 4:53pm EST
CHICAGO (Reuters) – An augmenting series of younger women in a United States are loitering their initial Pap exam for cervical cancer until after they strech 21, reflecting new U.S. guidelines, health officials pronounced on Thursday.
But 60 percent of U.S. women who have had a sum hysterectomy and no longer have a cervix are still removing a tests, a pointer that aged habits might die hard, experts said.
Although an annual Pap exam was once a customary of care, many veteran groups including a American Cancer Society, a American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and a U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-backed panel, now suggest that many women get tested any 3 to 5 years, and that younger women check their initial exam until 21.
And these same 3 groups determine that screening is nonessential for many women who have had a sum hysterectomy – a dismissal of a uterus and cervix – for non-cancerous reasons. Likewise, women over 65 who have had years of disastrous tests no longer need to be screened.
The discipline are meant to quell overscreening, that increases a risk of nonessential medicine and preterm birth in younger women, and adds nonessential cost to a caring of women over 65 who have never had a problem Pap and those who have had their cervix removed.
In light of a changes, dual teams during a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed Pap exam information from 2000 to 2010 to see how good doctors were adjusting to a call for reduction visit screening.
They found a series of women aged 18 to 21 who had never been screened doubled, rising to 47.5 percent in 2010. The group also found that in 2010, women age 30 and comparison were reduction expected to news carrying a Pap exam in a final 3 years.
And while Pap contrast fell among women who had a hysterectomy, dropping to 60 percent in 2010 from 73 percent in 2000, a series still reflects poignant overtreatment.
Meg Watson, an epidemiologist with CDC’s Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, pronounced there are some women who need to continue screening after a hysterectomy, including those whose medicine was finished to mislay cancers. But that series is small.
“We feel that this would still be a minority of women, and it should not be a 60 percent that we’re saying now,” she said.
CDC researchers pronounced a guideline changes are recent, though a trends do simulate a change toward adhering to them.
TEST ‘DEEPLY ENTRENCHED’
Dr. David Chelmow, a highbrow of obstetrics and gynecology during Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, who helped write a latest ACOG guidelines, concedes that it creates small clarity to continue to give unchanging Pap smears to so many women who already have had a hysterectomy.
“It’s tough to get cervical cancer though a cervix,” he said.
Chelmow pronounced widespread cervical cancer screening has significantly reduced cervical cancer rates in a United States, that have depressed by 70 percent in a final 4 decades.
The use of annual Pap tests is “deeply, deeply entrenched,” he said.
Although overscreening adds to health costs and unneeded worry and procedures for everyone, overscreening immature women might lift even larger risks since treatments can break a cervix and bushel a immature woman’s chances of carrying a child full term, pronounced Watson of a CDC.
Cervical cancer is a slow-growing cancer caused by bearing to certain strains of a tellurian papillomavirus (HPV), a common intimately transmitted illness that causes precancerous abnormalities of a cervix.
In women underneath 21, HPV infection is really common, though cancer itself is “vanishingly rare,” occurring during a rate of about one in 1 million, Chelmow said.
Cervical cancer is a second many common cancer in women worldwide, with about 500,000 new cases and 250,000 deaths any year, according to a World Health Organization.
In a United States, about 12,000 women grown new cases of cervical cancer final year, and 4,220 women died from their cancer, according to a American Cancer Society.
Most deaths start in women who were intermittently screened or were not screened during all.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Eric Beech)
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