8 Million Women Are Missing Out On This MAJOR Health Test.

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/missing-pap-smears

Are you one of them?

You probably think you’ve been screened for cervical cancer. After all, that’s what a pap smear is for, right? But the CDC just released a startling new report: 10 percent of American women (aged 21-65) say they haven’t been screened for cervical cancer in the last five years.

And the numbers just get scarier. Of the American women who are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year, more than half have never been screened, or haven’t been screened in the last five years.

MORE: Is This the END of Pap Smears?

Your first inclination might be to ask yourself: Wait, have I had a cervical cancer screening? Yes, indeed, the pap smear you get from your ob-gyn is your cervical cancer screening. It gets extra confusing, because as you may remember, guidelines for pap smears recently changed. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists now recommend that women between the ages of 21-29 receive a pap test every three years, instead of annually. Women ages 30-65 should be screened every five years if they combine the test with a HPV test. (These guidelines may vary based on health and lifestyle factors, or if you have an abnormal test result.)

So are these new guidelines leading to lack of cervical cancer screenings? That's not likely, clarifies Vanessa Cullins, M.D., vice president of external medical affairs for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The guidelines actually changed to reduce the number of women who were getting false positives, leading to invasive and unnecessary follow-up procedures like colposcopies and cryotherapy. Plus, this CDC data was collected in 2012, and the screening guidelines had just changed in March 2012, so the chances of that affecting the rate of being screened in the past five years is slim.