Close breast tissue and tumors appear alike on scans, which can make the latter difficult to identify
Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
If you have dense breast tissue, you can take advantage of an extra round of cancer screening, according to a large study that found this caught tumors that were mashed in standard mammograms.
Britain’s healthcare services offer mammograms, a form of X -ray scan, between 50 and 71 years to screen for breast cancer. These look for white growths that are signs of cancer. But about half of women in this age group have close breast, which means they have a high proportion of fibrous and glandular tissue, which also emerges as white on the scans. This can make tumors harder for these individuals.
“The problem with dense breasts is that we see cancers too late, they are too big, and this leads to an unfavorable prognosis,” says Thomas Helbich at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, which was uninvited in the trial.
To see if further screening could tackle this, Sarah Vinnicomme recruited at the University of Dundee, UK, and her colleagues more than 6,000 women aged 50 to 70 from all over Britain who had dense breasts and whose mammograms came back clear in their most reflective screening. The researchers randomly divided the participants into three groups who received additional screening in the form of EIT. an MRI, an ultrasound or an advanced form of X -ray scan called contrast -enhanced mammography.
The extra screening detained a total of 85 small tumors, with MRI and contrast -enhanced mammography, detecting three times more tumors than ultrasound. Twelve of these tumors we contained within milk channels, which is why we spread ourselves across the chest. But the remaining 73 tumors were invasive when cancer cells have grown through the lining of the ducts of the surrounding breast tissue and then have greater potential to spread further.
“It is very important to find these cancers; usually they grow, and if you register them three, oven years later, they will be bigger in size,” says Helbich. “Since some people want to be aggressive, I’m pretty sure supplementing -screening would save lives.”
But we do not know if this would certainly be the case. For example, a 2021 trials with the screening of ovarian cancer led to a reduced occurrence of the condition but did not translate that life was saved. It is also possible that the detected tumors are not cancerous or unlikely to spread. If this is the case, additional screening can lead to effortless concern or treatment.
The team plans to continue tracking participants to help measure if extra screening helps save lives and if it could justify the cost of rolling it out, Vinnicombe says.
Topics: