If you manage to get a vaccine appointment and you are scheduled to undergo a fertility procedure, tell your fertility doctor right away so that you can plan any surgical procedures, testing or treatment.
All timing issues aside, getting vaccinated is the right thing to do, experts say. Based on all of the reassuring evidence to date, when it comes to fertility or pregnancy, “there are no known safety concerns with the vaccine,” said Dr. Sigal Klipstein, a reproductive endocrinologist in Chicago who is a member of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Covid-19 Task Force.
“Women who contract Covid during pregnancy are at increased risk for more severe disease compared to women who get Covid when they’re not pregnant,” she added.
Image
A debate persists over screening frequency for breast cancer the second leading cause of cancer death for women after lung cancer.Credit.Njeri Mwangi/Reuters
To the Editor:
We take issue with an editorial in JAMA Internal Medicine that said frequent screening of younger women for breast cancer can do “more harm than good.” As physicians who diagnose and treat breast cancer at Weill Cornell Medicine, we seek to minimize the impact of this disease, which continues to kill about 44,000 American women a year.
We are especially concerned about the effect of such misinformation on the health of African-American women, who are more likely to receive a diagnosis of breast cancer at younger ages and are more likely to die from breast cancer at all ages.
The team of researchers led by Brian Sprague, PhD, of University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine found that in April 2020, screening rates fell to 1.1% of expected volume based on comparative historical data. By July 2020, that rate rebounded to 89.7%.
However, the group said a substantial cumulative deficit in mammography screening remains, due to missed exam appointments from March through May 2020. In an effort to reduce that deficit, screening rates will need to be above prepandemic levels.
Less information is available on diagnostic mammography, with two studies reporting that volume was reduced by as much as 80% during the early stage of the pandemic, according to the authors
Journal of Medical Screening.
Interval breast cancers are cancers diagnosed after a negative mammography screening but before the next recommended screening exam. They can be linked to a poor prognosis, such as cancer that has already spread or more aggressive types of cancers.
The aim of the study was to determine if adding AI to reading mammography as a supportive tool may help in decreasing the interval cancer rate in population-based organized mammography screening programs in Germany.
Results suggest that the ProFound AI for 2D Mammography software may help detect 48% of interval cancers and 93% of subgroups that include false negatives and minimal-sign lesions.