By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff

An influential scientific panel today jolted widely accepted beliefs about breast cancer screening, recommending that women in their 40s forgo routine mammograms and that older women undergo the test every other year instead of annually.

The US Preventive Services Task Force, established by the federal government to set standards on disease prevention and primary care, concluded that mammography saves relatively few lives in women 40 to 49, and that this benefit is eclipsed by the risks, including tests that erroneously detect tumors when none exist.

The task force used a similar analysis to determine that women from 50 to 74 -- when breast cancer becomes increasingly common -- should be screened, but that little was gained by performing mammograms on a yearly schedule. The panel also found that breast self-examinations are not useful, at any age.

The guidelines, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, will likely sow considerable consternation among women and their doctors. Recommendations on who should be screened -- and when -- have vacillated for decades, although in recent years, most groups have championed breast cancer screening starting at 40. In fact, the Preventive Services Task Force seven years ago endorsed exactly such a policy. The American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, the government's cancer research agency, continue to advise routine mammograms for this age group.

People with advanced dementia spend their last days suffering the same pain, complications, and poor prognosis as people with other terminal conditions, according to a new study that urges better care focused on providing comfort at the end of their lives.

Dr. Susan Mitchell of Hebrew SeniorLife Institute for Aging Research and Harvard Medical School led a study of 323 patients with end-stage dementia at 22 nursing homes near Boston. Writing in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, they report that the life expectancy for advanced dementia patients was close to what late-stage cancer or congestive heart failure patients might anticipate. Like dying cancer patients, the dementia patients also experienced infections, fever, and eating problems.

"Dementia is a terminal illness," Mitchell said in an interview. "When families understand this is the end stage, most of them will want comfort care as the goal."

Massachusetts has made a strong showing in a $348 million federal grant program that encourages biomedical researchers to engage in high-risk projects with the potential to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into treatments.

Eleven of 42 Transformational R01 grants are flowing to scientists in the state and 12 of 55 New Innovator award winners are based here. One of 18 Pioneer Award recipients is from Massachusetts. All three programs from the National Institutes of Health are designed to spur exploration that may have been deemed too risky in past rounds.

Boston University's Metropolitan College is offering scholarships to patients being cared for at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the university said today.

The program, housed in the BU division geared to adult learners, offers assistance starting in the fall to cancer patients who want to start or resume an undergraduate education as full-time or part-time students. Current Dana-Farber patients or patients who have received care in the past 18 months are eligible to apply for the scholarships. They will be awarded based on financial need.

Money for the scholarships comes from donations, BU said. About $25,000 has been raised. Courses at Metropolitan College cost from $350 to $700 per credit.

Whether you call them missed diagnoses or delays in seeking care, cancer cases that could have been caught earlier engender sharp regret, Dr. Pauline Chen writes in a New York Times column that asks how much responsibility doctors and patients bear.

For an answer she turns to Dr. Saul Weingart, vice-president of Quality Improvement and Patient Safety at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In a study published in the June issue of The Journal of Internal Medicine, he and his Harvard colleagues write that both doctors and patients missed steps in 25 out of 100 cases where breast cancer was spotted at an advanced stage.

About half of those failures could be traced to something the patients didn't do: missed mammogram appointments or not going to specialists their primary care doctors referred them to, Weingart told Chen. When they looked more closely, Weingart said, the researchers found that these women were more likely to face barriers of language, transportation difficulties, and family obligations that made it harder for them to follow their doctors' advice.

Doctors should step in to help, Weingart says in Chen's column, while acknowledging that responsibility is shared between doctors and patients.

"Given that the patients who fall through the cracks are usually the least resourceful and most vulnerable, there is at least a moral obligation for clinicians and health care systems to provide a robust safety net for these patients," he says. "I think we physicians need to support patient responsibility, but we also need to get our own house in order first. ... After we get that figured out, we then need to think about ways to help our patients do what they need to do."

Grief after the loss of a loved one can be overwhelming. For most people this intense but normal reaction eases, usually after six months or so. For a minority, grief can be distressing and disabling.

Researchers led by Holly Prigerson of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School make the case that prolonged grief is a distinct disorder that should be included in the next Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychiatry profession's noted reference work.

A healthcare executive with a background in Boston has been named to manage operations at a high-security research laboratory in the city's South End, Boston University announced today.

John D. Nash became chief operating officer of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on July 20. He comes from the Ireland Cancer Center at University Hospitals in Cleveland, where he was senior vice president and general manager. Before that he was executive vice president and chief operating officer of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Earlier in his career Nash was chief of hospital operations at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He earned a bachelors' degree at Boston College and master's in healthcare administration from Duke University.

The BU biolab, housed in a $198 million building on Albany Street, is vacant while additional safety reviews are completed, which could take until late next year. Residents in the South End and Roxbury have sued to block its opening, contending that the deadly viruses and bacteria studied there would pose too great a hazard to the densely populated neighborhood near the lab.

A research collaboration based in Boston has won a five-year, $15 million grant to study how the hepatitis C virus defies immune system efforts to defeat it.

The Cooperative Center for Translational Research in Human Immunology, which will be based at Massachusetts General Hospital, won the grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the hospital said. Dr. Raymond Chung, director of hepatology in the MGH Gastrointestinal Unit, will co-direct the new center with Dr. Paul Klenerman of Oxford University.

The center also includes researchers from MIT, Harvard, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Wistar Institute, in Philadelphia.

Hepatitis C is a viral, blood-borne disease that can cause a life-threatening liver infection. Some people recover from the infection, but for most people the illness is chronic. The center will explore how the immune system fails to suppress and remove the virus.

Boston hospitals made a strong showing in the newest US News & World Report rankings.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital both scored high on the honor roll for hospitals with top scores in at least six of the 16 specialties rated. Mass. General was fifth and the Brigham was 10th on the 21-member list.

The rankings are based on patient outcomes, reputation, and care-related measures. Out of 4,861 hospitals in the country, 174 scored high enough to be included on the specialty lists.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center made the top 50 in eight specialties and Boston Medical Center was ranked in three.

Boston cancer researchers looked outside typical funding sources when they wanted to try a novel laboratory experiment, an example cited in a New York Times story about federal grants favoring science that "plays it safe."

Dr. Ewa T. Sicinska of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute didn't even apply for a National Institutes of Health grant when she wanted to grow human cancers in mice, according to Dr. George D. Demetri, who leads the research group supporting her. Implanting human cancer cells in mice has been tried before, in hopes of understanding the disease better, but with little success.

Sicinska embarked on the work with support from the Ludwig Fund, which allows six cancer centers, including Dana-Farber, to use its money as they see fit. With a quarter of a million dollars of Ludwig money, she has implanted tumors in mice without immune systems, the story says. Four types of sarcomas — cancers of fat, muscle or bone — are growing in them and look genetically identical to the tumors removed from patients.

Demetri told the Times he did not apply for an NIH grant “because we have lots of experience in what’s fundable.”