Purpose: to assess compliance with the recommendations for opportunistic breast cancer screening by mammography.
Methods: 460 women from the town of Taubaté, São Paulo, Brazil, were followed-up prospectively after the index mammography, 327 of them attended by the public health system and 133 by the private system. We evaluated the prevalence of mammography repetition, the adherence rates and predictive factors associated with the current recommendations of mammographic screening. The association of the outcomes with the independent variables was studied by obtaining the risk rates (RR) and the respective 95% confidence intervals (95%CI). The adjusted prevalence rates were calculated by the COX regression model.
Results: although more than 90% of the studied women repeated the mammography at least once, the rate of correct compliance with the recommendations of mammographic screening, with repetition of the procedure every 24 months, was low (about 30% of the study sample). The preditive factors associated with compliance with mammographic screening were related to the unequal access to public or private healthcare services (RR=1.77; 95%CI=1.26-2.48) and to previous screening (RR=3.07; 95%CI=1.86-5.08).
Conclusion: we concluded that compliance with the recommendations of opportunistic mammographic screening for breast cancer was low in both studied population segments.