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ROCHESTER, N.Y. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Each year, 180,000 women in the U.S. will be told they have breast cancer. Mammograms are the gold standard for finding breast cancers, but they don't catch them all.
"My mom was diagnosed in her 30s with breast cancer," Eckert says. "My sister was diagnosed when she turned 40."
Eckert had her first mammogram when she was 28 years old. "I want every test possible so that if I have it, I find it early," she says. Eckert joined a study on the Cone Beam Breast CT Scanner, ,a new way to spot hard-to-detect cancers that mammograms miss.
"We know that even the best mammographer in the world will miss 10 percent to 15 percent of breast cancers in certain types of breasts," says Avice O'Conell, M.D., a radiologist at the University of Rochester in New York.
Unlike mammograms, the scanner does not compress the breast. Women simply place each breast in a hole as the scanner captures 3-D images. "In certain people with the difficult type of breast, it may indeed improve the detection of small cancers," Dr. O'Connell says.
About 50 percent of women have dense breast tissue, making cancers harder to find. Here's a dense breast with cancer on a mammogram. That same cancer is easier to find with the new scanner. The ability to rotate the breast and view it from any angle has Dr. O'Connell excited about the future.
"It is very exciting to us, as radiologists, to think that this might, down the road, help us to find those small early cancers," Dr. O'Connell says.
Eckert is also excited about the scanner. "Just because I have escaped 40 and haven't had breast cancer doesn't mean that I don't have risk still for that," she says.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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