Medical Discovery News
Science permeates everyday life. Yet the understanding of advances in biomedical science is limited at best. Few people make the connection that biomedical science is medicine and that biomedical scientists are working today for the medicine of tomorrow. Our weekly five-hundred-word newspaper column (http://www.illuminascicom.com/) and two-minute radio show provide insights into a broad range of biomedical science topics. Medical Discovery News is dedicated to explaining discoveries in biomedical research and their promise for the future of medicine. Each release is designed to stimulate listeners to think, question and appreciate how science affects their health as well as that of the rest of the world. We also delve into significant biomedical discoveries and portray how science (or the lack of it) has impacted health throughout history.
Medical Discovery News
Screening When Breasts are Dense
Welcome to Medical Discovery News. I’m Dr David Niesel.
And I’m Dr. Norbert Herzog.
Many women who recently learned they have dense breast tissue may not know that extra screening can save lives.
Dense breast tissue shows up whiter than fatty breast tissue, which makes it harder to spot the white lesions of early-stage breast cancer.
This means cancer in dense breast may be discovered later, giving these women poorer survival outcomes.
A new study of nine thousand UK women questioned whether extra screening can find cancer and which types are best. The short answer is yes.
There are three types of scans and they all beat regular mammograms. The Automated Breast Ultrasound uses 3D ultrasound technology to image the entire breast.
The AbMRI injects a dye before the patient gets a magnetic scan to produce high-resolution images of the breast and body.
The last is Contrast Enhanced Mammography which is like a regular mammogram, but with an IV injection of iodine-based dye. It highlights abnormal blood vessels and hyperactive tissues that can happen with cancer.
The last two scans detected eighty-five cancers that regular mammograms missed. The MRI and iodine mammogram also found three times as many invasive cancers as the whole breast ultrasound. The tumors they found were also smaller which means they can detect early-stage cancer. Which may lead to better outcomes.
Researchers predict adding the two scans would detect thirty-five hundred more cancers a year in the UK, saving an extra seven hundred lives. Talk with your doctor about getting extra scans if you have dense breast tissue.
We are Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog, at UTMB and Quinnipiac University, where biomedical discoveries shape the future of medicine. For much more and our disclaimer go to medicaldiscoverynews.com or listen to our podcast on your favorite podcast service.
