Breast cancer screening in an insured population: whom are we missing?

Introduction: Kaiser Permanente Colorado is an integrated health care system that uses automatic reminder programs and reduces barriers to access preventive services, including financial barriers. Breast cancer screening rates have not improved during the last five years, and rates differ between subgroups: for example, black and Latina women have lower rates of mammography screening than other racial groups.

Methods: We retrospectively evaluated data from 47,946 women age 52 to 69 years who had continuous membership for 24 months but had not undergone mammography.

A cautionary note on the use of autoregressive models in analysis of longitudinal data.

Rosner et al. presented a simple, easily implemented modelling method for retaining time order relationships in analyses of longitudinal data when successive measures are correlated. Evaluation of time order is particularly useful in epidemiologic studies concerned with exposure to potentially toxic substances and subsequent outcome, but may also have use in more traditional growth studies that relate intake to subsequent development.