Canadian Medical Groups Recommend to Start Cervical Cancer Screenings Before 25

The Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada, and a couple of other medical organizations, have argued in contradiction to a national task force’s recommendations for women to wait until they are 25-years-old to begin their cervical cancer screening. The SOGC recently published an article alleging that the age 25 is a little too late for beginning Pap testing since precancerous and cancerous lesions might even develop in younger ages in several cases. The groups collectively suggest that young women shall begin their Pap testing from age 21 onwards, while continuing them with a frequency gap of an average between two or three years.

The article contradicts guidelines laid down by The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, which proposed a nationally suggested plan in early January, recommending women to wait for every three years between each screening and to continue them until they are aged 69 or older. Previously, women were always advised to receive annual Pap smears, but recently majority countries have considerably enlarged the interval between subsequent tests.

The CEO of SOGC, Dr. Jennifer Blake, explained her point of view on Thursday from Ottawa, by elaborating that “we do think that you can find, and we do find, advanced lesions in young girls or even if we find early lesions in young girls, just by doing very minor things, removing those abnormal cells even in the process of a biopsy, you impact the natural history of the disease.”