1. Know your breast density. 90% of women dont and 95% of women dont know that it increases your breast cancer risk. The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram. 2. If youre pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first 2 weeks of your menstrual cycle when breast density is relatively lower. 3. If you notice a persistent change in your breast, insist on additional imaging. 4. I do believe that women aged 40 and older should have an annual mammogram. Mammography isnt perfect, but its the only test that has been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer. We need to individualise screening based on density. For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice. Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI): so how does it work? The patient receive an injection of a radiotracer thats taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells, but not by normal cells. And this is the key difference from mammography. Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue and weve seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast. But MBI exploits the different molecular behaviour of tumors and therefore its impervious to breast density. Also, MBI uses only light pain free compression. We compared screening mammograms with the MBI on 1000 women. Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25% of these tumors. MBI found 83%.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 02:50:58 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015