American Cancer Society Recommends MRIs for High-Risk Breast Cancer Patients
A new report released by the American Cancer Society (ACS) reinforces the critical role medical imaging plays in the diagnosis of breast cancer.
The organization's new guidelines, featured in its journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, now recommend that women with an unusually high risk of developing breast cancer should get annual MRIs in addition to their annual mammograms. Click for guidelines. Click for New York Times story.
Because MRIs are more sensitive than mammograms, they are able to detect early indicators of breast cancer in high risk individuals that mammograms cannot. For many women, this could be a life-saving discovery.
"These guidelines are a critical step to help define who should be screened using MRI in addition to mammography, a question of significant importance as we discover women at very high risk of breast cancer can be diagnosed much earlier when combining the two technologies rather than using mammography alone," Christy Russell, MD, chair of the ACS Breast Cancer Advisory Group and co-author of the new guidelines stated.
The guidelines are also, for the first time, recommending MRI for screening women who show no signs of cancer, but possess a breast cancer gene or have a first-degree relative with the gene.
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