The American Cancer Society has just released new breast cancer screening guidelines that substantially scale back its previous recommendations. They move much closer to the controversial recommendations made by the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) in 2009. According to the ACS, screening should now be delayed until age 45, with annual screening until age 55, then biannual screening until age 75, when screening should stop. These new recommendations meet the USPSTF roughly halfway. (Until this week, the ACS recommended annual screening after age 40.)

I am no cancer specialist, but merely a simple country cardiac electrophysiologist. In general, I still have a residual amount of trust in the ACS (as opposed to, for instance, the American Heart Association). So I am open to the idea that the new ACS recommendations may in some way be reasonable.

However, admittedly without any direct evidence, I suspect that the ACS has instead chosen to interpret available clinical evidence in a way that moves them closer to the USPSTF, as a matter of institutional survival. For it will not pay, in the long run, for any professional organization to get on the wrong side of the USPSTF.