Thank you so much.
My name is Carolyn Holland. I'm here today not just as a 46-year-old breast cancer patient, but as a mother, wife, sister, daughter, colleague and friend.
As a volunteer with Dense Breasts Canada advocating for earlier screening, I'm thrilled that Ontario lowered the age to 40 yesterday. Unlike the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Healthcare, Ontario listened to experts and followed current evidence.
I'm excited for women to have the opportunity to detect cancer early and avoid the lifelong repercussions I face from not having had the chance. My doctor never raised the topic of screening in my forties, and by the time I discovered a lump at the age of 43, the cancer had already spread to my lymph nodes. My life has been forever changed by these dangerously outdated guidelines.
The 2024 guidelines are similar to those my family doctor followed three years ago. I am concerned that recent gains from more provinces adopting self-referral at 40 will be undermined by the ongoing influence of misinformation from the task force, which may dissuade women from screening.
Task force representatives insist that women discuss the so-called harms and benefits of mammograms with their doctors before booking. Informed decision-making requires accurate information, yet doctors are not being instructed to tell women the truth: that cancers are often more aggressive in the forties, with the highest years of life lost to women diagnosed in their forties. Instead, doctors are instructed to say that the risk of breast cancer is low in this age group and that screening is less beneficial than for older women. They share the task force's exaggerated harms of false positives, which are really just callbacks for more images, and they flag theoretical overdiagnosis, a risk that is minimal for women in their forties.
Doctors also rely on the task force's 1,000-person tool, but its flawed one-size-fits-all approach ignores personal risk factors like ethnicity, family history and breast density. The only benefit this tool considers is the decreased risk of dying of breast cancer and not the years of life gained or the benefits of avoiding mastectomy and chemotherapy. It presents women with a limited view of the benefits of screening over the next 10 years instead of much greater lifetime benefits. This messaging misguides doctors and patients and denies women the full picture they deserve to make a truly informed decision.
As long as the task force guidelines remain unchanged, Canadian women will continue to receive misleading information that downplays the life-saving benefits of early detection.
Thank you.