I looked into this earlier but didn't have a chance to finish typing up a post, 'cause I decided to work at work instead

The standards for elderly woman are - if doctors expect that she still has a good 5 year survival rate, then they recommend that screening mammograms should be done. I'm assuming that they're basing that upon finding that if you have more than 5 years of life left, the benefits of mammography far outweigh the risks.

Risks of radiation damage by mammography - greater when you're younger, but after age 40, the risk is thought to be equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes. The worst case scenarios that have been worked out estimate the potential for mammography radiation induced cancers to be 3 cases in 1 million women.

As for the pain of biopsy - I don't see how that's a risk of mammography. You get a big needle stuck in and something taken out. Yes, you have that happen and I guess there's a possiblity that malignant transformation or metastases is not going to occur for a while and there's not currently a good weigh of predicting that (however, from a biopsy or tumor sample it's usually fairly easy to see how disorganized the structure of the tissue is and how far along it is along the path.... And when you have metastatic tumors that can dump something like a million cells into the blood stream at a time... I'm thinking avoiding anything leading up to metastases is to be avoided)... However, pre-malignant lesions are usually just removed surgically and are not treated with radiation & chemotherapy - so now potential damage to the heart or lungs. You can also look at what genes are upregulated by the lesion - and there are several that have been associated with high risk of malignancy or death... That technology is still evolving...

However, I'm not sure if I have a pre-malignant lesion, I want to leave it in me just because the gene profile of it shows that it's highly possibly it will be stable for X number of years and risk it.

Anyways - I would love if everyone who reads something on the internet decides to research it themselves and takes it with a grain of salt. However, the number of people that think Obama is muslim has convinced me that is not so, and I know a lot of people hate mammograms and are looking for excuses to not bother and I'd hate for this forum thread to be their excuse.