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Jewish women should get mammograms at 40, experts say. Here’s why.

When Yaffa Leah Field was in her late 20s, she decided to undergo genetic testing.

Her grandmother had had breast cancer, and Field wanted to know whether she was among the one of every 40 Jewish women of Ashkenazi descent with either the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genetic mutations, which make them extra susceptible to breast cancer.

If she did have one of those mutations, her chances of developing breast cancer by age 70 would be roughly 50% in her lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“The test came back negative,” said Field, now 43 and the mother of three boys.

Though temporarily relieved, she knew that breast cancer risk is not limited to those with the genetic mutations. Roughly one in eight women will develop the disease in their lifetime, and men, too, can have breast cancer.

Close monitoring, therefore, is essential. For women, that means not only regularly checking their breasts themselves for lumps or abnormalities, but getting mammograms. The question is when to start.

Field, who now works at Sharsheret, the national Jewish nonprofit that offers education, counseling and support to women facing breast and ovarian cancer, got her professional start as a physician’s assistant, so she knew how important it was to “do my screening on time.”

But what exactly “on time” means has been the subject of much debate and disagreement.

The question came to the fore again this spring when a panel of experts serving on the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) revised earlier guidelines and changed the recommended age that women get their first mammograms to 40, from 50, and suggested that they continue to have mammograms done once every two years. It’s not the first time the recommendation has changed.

“In 2016 the US Task Force changed the guidelines from 40 to 50,” said Dr. Caryn Gamss, a radiologist at Murray Hill Radiology in Manhattan.

Gamss is also a member of Sharsheret’s Medical Advisory Board. In her practice, Gamss adheres to guidelines from the American College of Radiology that recommend starting yearly screenings at age 40 provided a person has no risk factors.

“Fifty is too late,” Gamss says.

Even waiting until age 40 can be risky, as recent studies have shown high breast cancer mortality rates for women in that age group, she noted.

“People need to think about it younger instead of waiting and then finding out ‘My mother had cancer, my grandmother…’ — and they show up at 40 and have cancer, too,” Gamss said.

Her recommendation is that all women undergo a breast cancer risk assessment by age 25. That entails answering a panel of questions that covers one’s family and medical history. Among other things, the assessment inquires whether a person had “a biopsy and a high risk lesion; breast density, if someone has lymphoma and was treated under the age of 25; if someone got upper abdominal radiation before age 25.”

The responses to these questions help doctors determine when and how individual patients should be screened — including whether to do MRIs and ultrasounds to supplement mammograms, for example. At-risk women should start their 30s armed with information and a plan.

Short of that, there is what Peggy Cottrell, Sharsheret’s genetics program manager, calls a general rule of thumb: “If breast cancer has been diagnosed at a particular age, you want to start screening 10 years before that. So if someone’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 45, that person is going to start screening at 35.”

Avoiding smoking and alcohol, exercising, and a good diet are important to maintaining good health, Cottrell notes, but perhaps the biggest factor is chance. In fact, hereditary cancers like those caused by BRCA mutations account for only 15% of all breast cancers; most occur for reasons unknown. That makes screening all the more essential.

“For many women, knowing there is something they can do that can reduce their risk motivates them,” she said.

Many women delay getting mammograms out of fear of the results, nervousness about the process or just general anxiety. This is another area where Sharsheret provides women with help and guidance – even in the waiting room.

In order for doctors to interpret mammograms properly, they require two specific views of each breast. Sometimes, technicians need to take more than four photos to ensure they get those views; it doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

Women with no risk factors should get their first mammogram at age 40, experts now say, and to determine their level of risk, all women should undergo a breast cancer risk assessment by age 25. (Carol Yepes/Getty Images)

Even if you’re asked to come for a follow-up mammogram – what’s known as a diagnostic mammogram – it just means that more imaging is required, not that there’s necessarily a problem. Sometimes doctors observe a change in appearance from the prior year or a fold in the skin; other times the original image failed to capture the necessary view. Likewise, for some younger women and those with dense breasts, a mammogram may not suffice; doctors may require an ultrasound or MRI to examine the breast adequately.

Adina Fleischmann, a social worker who serves as Sharsheret’s chief services officer, recommends that each individual discuss their own circumstances with their healthcare provider. Sharsheret tries to promote awareness of the importance of getting breast cancer risk assessments, and to provide guidance to women about what to ask.

“We want to make sure that each woman who reaches out is able to ask the right questions: How often should I be screened? What’s the most appropriate screening method for me? Questions about what breast density means and how it can impact them,” Fleischmann said. “Those are the tools we want to give to our women.”

Women seeking guidance are encouraged to call Sharsheret toll-free at 866 474-2774 to connect with therapists and genetic counselors.

Sharsheret also offers peer-to-peer support, programs to guide cancer patients on how to talk about their illness with their children, and support to people who have a family member with breast cancer, including financial assistance for non-medical services critical to women’s quality of life and body image, such as acquiring wigs. Sharsheret also hosts live events such as barbecues, online yoga classes, family fun runs and other programs to empower women with cancer and foster a sense of community.

The education and awareness programming Sharsheret runs start as early as high school and college campuses, such as an annual Pink Day that includes grassroots fundraising events at hundreds of campuses worldwide.

“Sharsheret is here to arm you with education and to let you know that you’re not alone,” Fleischmann said. “Cancer screening, and the knowledge that comes along with it, can be empowering. By speaking with your healthcare provider about the screening guidelines that are most appropriate for you, you are taking a step toward your best health.”

As for Field, she went for her first baseline mammogram at age 40 — in the spring of 2020, just as Covid hit and the world masked up and locked down. The doctors identified something suspicious.

“It started a roller coaster of diagnostic testing. I wound up with eight biopsies, and in the end I had a bilateral mastectomy,” Field said after cancer was identified. “I feel thankful it was found very early.”

Her advice: Know your body and your family history.

“Breast cancer doesn’t just affect women 40 and older,” Field said. “Know your potential risks. Empower yourself to know what you need to be aware of. It shouldn’t be a shock. Be appropriately proactive.”

“And most importantly, when you reach the age when it’s recommended, get screened,” Field said. “It may be uncomfortable for a few minutes, but it’ll give you peace of mind.”

—
The post Jewish women should get mammograms at 40, experts say. Here’s why. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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