Dear AuntMinnie Members,
The use of MRI to screen women at high risk for breast cancer got the thumbs-up this week from the American Cancer Society (ACS). The Atlanta-based society said that breast MRI should be used with conventional mammography as part of an annual screening regimen in certain groups of women.
In a new guideline, the ACS said that breast MRI screening should only be used with certain groups of high-risk women, such as BRCA mutation carriers and those with a family history of breast cancer. The society stopped short of recommending breast MRI screening for other groups, such as women at average risk, those who have already had cancer, or those with very dense breasts.
Despite the caveats, the recommendation is a major step toward moving breast MRI into the clinical mainstream of screening for high-risk women. Read all about it in our Women's Imaging Digital Community by clicking here.
In a related story, a new study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that MRI can be useful in detecting contralateral breast cancer in women who already have the disease in one breast.
Researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle found that breast MRI had good sensitivity, specificity, and negative predictive value, and in some cases detected contralateral breast cancer that was missed with mammography and clinical examination. An accompanying editorial stated that breast MRI's tendency toward producing a large number of false positives was outweighed by its diagnostic value.
Get that story by clicking here, and visit our Women's Imaging Digital Community at women.auntminnie.com for more news about breast imaging.
