FRIDAY, Dec. 8, 2023 (HealthDay News) — For women with breast cancer aged 50 years or older and three years postdiagnosis, outcomes are no worse with less frequent mammograms than annual mammograms, according to a study presented at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held from Dec. 5 to 9 in San Antonio.

Janet A. Dunn, Ph.D., from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, and colleagues conducted a multicenter, randomized, controlled, phase III trial of annual mammography versus mammography every two years for conservation surgery and mammography every three years for mastectomy patients. The analyses included 5,235 women with breast cancer who were randomly assigned between April 2014 and September 2018; 87 percent had invasive disease.

The researchers found that 319 women died within a median follow-up of 5.4 years; 104 died from breast cancer (53 in annual arm; 51 in less frequent arm). At five years, breast cancer-specific survival was 98.2 and 98.3 percent in the annual and less frequent arms, respectively, for a hazard ratio of 1.04 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.71 to 1.54), demonstrating noninferiority of less frequent mammograms at the 3 and 1 percent margins. The five-year recurrence-free interval was 94.2 and 94.4 percent for the annual and less frequent arms, respectively (hazard ratio, 1.03; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.83 to 1.28), demonstrating noninferiority at the 2 percent margin. At five years, overall survival was 94.9 and 94.3 percent in the annual and less frequent arms, respectively (hazard ratio, 1.18; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.94 to 1.47), demonstrating noninferiority at the 3 percent margin.

“The trial demonstrated that the outcomes from undergoing less frequent mammograms were no worse than undergoing annual mammograms for this group of women,” Dunn said in a statement.

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