Socioeconomic disparities in mammography screening in the United States from 2012 to 2020

The potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on socioeconomic disparities in mammography uptake remain poorly understood. We used repeated cross-sectional data from the 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 waves of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, focusing on the U.S. women aged 50–74 years and investigated the relationships of educational attainment, employment status, and household income with a missed mammogram in the past two years. We ran Poisson regression analyses accounting for survey weights. The sample numbers were 139,761 in 2012, 137,916 in 2014, 140,000 in 2016, 116,756 in 2018, and 102,774 in 2020, respectively. Women with the lower educational attainment and lower household incomes reported higher proportions of missed mammography screening. Self-employed women were most likely to miss a mammogram. Accounting for other covariates, there was an increase in the adjusted prevalence ratio (PR) of missed mammography from 2018 to 2020 (pre-pandemic versus post pandemic onset) for self-employed women compared to women in waged work. Non-Hispanic Black women who were self-employed (PR = 0.28, 95% CI: 0.16, 0.51) and employed for wages (PR = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.47, 0.73) were at lower risks of missing a mammogram compared to non-Hispanic White women in the same categories. The findings suggest that disparities for mammography uptake widened after the pandemic onset, especially for employment status, which varied by race/ethnicity.