Myths Surrounding Dense Breast

Breast cancer is increasing day by day in women. There is a lot of misinterpretation about screening mammography. It is a myth that when your age increases the chances of having cancer decreases.

Is Abbreviated MRI a Good Option?

Abbreviated Breast MRI is a low cost effecting and additional screening exam as compared to Breast MRI and that is why it is more common for detecting dense breast in women. It is regarded as the most sensitive tool for detecting breast cancer in women. 

What is 3D Mammography?

This is one of the modern methods, which helps in the analysis of dense breast cancer. It is mostly used in cases of breast cancer, where analysing the tissue is imperative for treatment. There are a lot of alternatives to this method, namely traditional mammography

Difficult Questions to Ask for Improving Breast Cancer Detection

Early detection of breast cancer is critical to survival. One in eight women will have breast cancer in their lifetime, with an early stage (American Cancer Society) survival rate of 99 percent for five years. Given these figures and the known limitations of the current detection of breast cancer,

5 Fast Facts about Breast Cancer Detection

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the world, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of women every year and affecting countries at all levels of modernization, according to the World Health Organization.

How Can Complementary Diagnostic Tools Improve Breast Cancer Detection?

50% Women's breasts are dense. High breast density on a mammogram is known to obscure cancer, often described as seeking a polar bear in a snowstorm that can lead to false negative results–results where early cancer is not identified and breast cancer is therefore detected at a later stage. It is diagnosed with the later breast cancer, the lower chance of survival. 

Effects of having extremely dense breasts

Less fatty tissue and more non - fatty tissue have dense breasts. Therefore, if your mother has dense breasts, there is an increased likelihood that you will have dense breasts as well.Breast density can have a significant impact on the accuracy of routine detection methods, such as mammography screening. 

Breast cancer biomarkers

Due to the discovery of specific prognostic and predictive bio-markers that allow the application of more individualized therapies to different molecular subgroups, breast cancer treatment has experienced several changes over the past decades.

What is Dense Breast Tissue and How Does It Affect Your Health?

The term "dense breasts" may sound straightforward, but do you know how to tell if you've got them or what health implications they might have? We explain dense breast tissue in this video and how it can affect your risk of breast cancer. Breasts are not consisting exclusively of fat.

Why breast density matters

Your radiologist or doctor may have told you after a routine mammogram that you have dense breasts. But what are dense breasts exactly, and how can they affect the risk of breast cancer? Simply put,

New guidelines of breast cancer screening

A group of health experts (US Preventive Services Task Force or USPSTF) revised the screening guidelines for breast cancer last year. Based on a systematic review of published evidence, women were recommended to have screening mammograms every two years rather than annually at an average risk in age group 50 to 74. They left it to the woman and her doctor to determine screening on the basis of their risk factors and harm vs. benefit preferences for women in the age group 40 to 49. This change sparked a firestorm fuelled by annual mammograms proponents and those concerned that insurance companies would need co-payments.

Recent simulation studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have confirmed that screening mammograms in age group 50 to 74 is most efficient once every two years for average risk women. Screening would provide the same benefit for these women annually, but would increase the rates of false positives, benign biopsies, and over-diagnosis. This also applied to younger women, even though they were at an increased risk of 2 to 4 fold. So the question becomes, what should an annual screening option for women do? Every other year, one strategy could be to consider additional and alternative tests.

While additional tests such as ultrasound have high false positive rates resulting in benign biopsies, due to lack of radiation exposure, it may be a safer option for the "off" years. A recent modelling study (funded by the National Cancer Institute) has shown that while 100,000 women avert 968 deaths from annual mammogram screening, it can induce 125 cases of breast cancer that lead to 16 deaths. For women with large breasts, this number doubles which requires additional views resulting in increased exposure to radiation. For women with dense breast tissue, an additional test strategy would definitely be better as ultrasound was known to detect cancers missed by mammography.

Success of Mammogram in Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Breast cancer in women worldwide is the most prevalent cancer and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Historically low-and middle-income countries reported significantly lower breast cancer incidence compared to the Americas and Europe.