New Screening Catches More Breast Cancers

Finding among new trends in breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, experts say.
By Amanda Gardner, HealthDay Reporter

While tremendous progress in screening and treatment for breast cancer has been made in recent years, some 184,000 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2008, and about 41,000 women will die of the disease.
Researchers are now focusing their efforts on reducing these numbers even further.
Four studies being presented this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's 2008 Breast Cancer Symposium in Washington, D.C., highlight both areas of progress and areas that need extra emphasis.
A screening technique known as molecular breast imaging (MBI) detected three times as many breast cancers in women who have dense breasts and who are at a higher risk of developing the disease. These findings suggest that MBI could one day be added to conventional mammography.
Using an injected radiotracer (provided, for this study, by Bristol-Myers Squibb), MBI is able to detect differences in the behavior of cancer tissue as compared to normal tissue.
In this study, MBI detected 10 of 13 cancers among 375 patients completing a 15-month follow-up period. Mammography, by contrast, detected three of 13 cancers.
"If we had had a combination of both techniques, we would have detected 11 of 13 cancers," said study author Carrie B. Hruska, a research fellow in the department of radiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "MBI detected more cancers than screening mammography but didn't produce more false positive results."
Hruska spoke at a Wednesday teleconference with authors of the three other studies.
Also, the number of biopsies that actually resulted in cancer was much higher with MBI (28 percent) than with mammography (18 percent).
"Based on the results, MBI has shown great promise as a valuable adjunct to screening mammography in women with dense breasts and who are at an increased risk of developing cancer," Hruska said.
But while relatively inexpensive and easy to use, MBI is not yet widely available.
"This is an area that is very important, and where we really need to do further work," said Dr. Eric Winer, moderator of the teleconference and director of the breast oncology center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.