Fewer U.S. women getting mammograms

After rising steadily for decades, the proportion of U.S. women getting mammograms to screen for breast cancer has dropped for the first time, federal researchers are reporting today.

The overall rate at which women are undergoing regular mammograms fell 4 percent between 2000 and 2005, marking the first significant decline since use of the breast X-rays started expanding rapidly in 1987, the study by the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

Breast cancer strikes more than 200,000 women each year and kills more than 40,000. But the odds of surviving have been rising, in part because more women are being diagnosed by mammograms at the earliest, most treatable stages.

The reasons remain unclear, but researchers speculated that it could be due to factors such as increasingly long waiting times to get appointments, waning fears about breast cancer, the drop in hormone use after menopause, and the ongoing debate over the benefits and risks of the exams.

Or how about we get real. Lack of health coverage, HMO's demanding certain women don't qualify, the lack of trust in certain minority groups for the medical profession and just plain lack of education, even about something as simple as self examinations.