Breast Cancer Screening

A large U.S. randomized clinical trial published in JAMA, the WISDOM study, assigned more than 28,000 women aged 40 to 74 either to standard annual mammography or to a personalized, risk‑based screening schedule and found that tailoring screening intensity to individual breast‑cancer risk did not increase the rate of advanced (stage 2B or higher) cancers. The risk‑based arm used genetic testing of nine breast‑cancer–related genes and other health factors to group women into high, elevated, average or low risk, leading to more intensive imaging for high‑risk women and less frequent or delayed imaging for low‑risk women, though it did not reduce overall biopsy numbers as hoped and outside experts caution it may not fully capture differences in detecting very early‑stage disease.