On the eve of World Cancer Day, Vítor Veloso told Lusa news agency that the League is prepared to implement population-based breast cancer screening on the ground, which will now cover women aged between 45 and 74, which until now it was intended for women between 50 and 69 years old.

“It is a challenge, as is evident because we will need more human resources (…) but the League has already taken the necessary precautions to ensure that this is not an obstacle” and “is ready to start in February as stipulated with the Ministry of Health”, he added.

Vítor Veloso said that LPCC has experienced teams and infrastructure across the country, which always promote this screening, in close collaboration with the National Health Service.

In recent statements to Lusa, the Secretary of State for Health, Ana Povo, said that the conditions for the operationalisation of screening are assured, explaining that women will be called to undergo mammography throughout 2025 depending on the region where they live and the itinerary from the vans of the Portuguese League Against Cancer.

With this expansion of screening, it is expected that 1,050,000 women will be called annually to have a mammogram, according to Ana Povo.

The most recent data on breast cancer in Portugal, published by the World Health Organization's Global Cancer Observatory for 2022, estimates that around 9,000 women were diagnosed with the disease and more than 2,000 died.

The LPCC emphasises that breast cancer has a cure rate of over 90% when diagnosed and treated early, and the importance of screening.

“The population-based breast cancer screening that the League implemented, together with the Ministry of Health, resulted in a 25% drop in the breast cancer mortality rate,” highlighted Vítor Veloso.

For the doctor, “it is an extraordinarily good number” that leads the LPPC to say that the request that it had been “making for a long time, to lower the age [of screening] to 45 years and increase it to 75 years was a fair demand and that finally, the Government came to agree with the League”.

According to the State Health Department, population-based screening programs are associated with a reduced risk of death from breast cancer and the risk of diagnosis of advanced breast neoplasms in asymptomatic women aged between 50 and 69 years.

Faced with an increase in the number of cases of various types of cancer and at younger ages, Vítor Veloso defended the importance of adequate prevention policies.

“If we effectively implement appropriate prevention policies and also if we do what this World Cancer Day advocates, which is personalised treatment for the patient and not for the disease, in which oncological care is centered on people, we will certainly have many more cures and we will also have a much longer survival rate with excellent quality of life”, he argued.