That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts.

For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice.

Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram, and the X ray often can't distinguish between the two.

But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X rays, are not influenced by breast density.

The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram.

Ninety percent of women don't, and 95 percent of women don't know that it increases your breast cancer risk.

Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram.

Two thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them.

First, know your density.

Mammograms are now used only for women recognized as at high risk for breast cancer.

The women are very good about getting mammograms now.

Cancer among Women and Mammograms

At the time my patient posed this question to me, breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature, and very few women having mammograms, or the physicians ordering them, knew about this.

Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer.

Mammography's the only one that's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim.

Second, if you're pre menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower.

Australia's national mammographic screening programme, BreastScreen Australia, introduced in 1991, is aimed at achieving significant reductions in mortality and morbidity from breast cancer through early detection of the disease.

If the breast is less than 25 percent dense, that's called fatty replaced.

And although breast density generally declines with age, up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause.

The second, the Canadian National Breast Screening Study, which began in the 1980s, also used annual mammograms and breast examinations for the screened group. But, in the control group, women aged 50 59 also received annual clinical breast examinations, and women aged 40 49 were given a single breast examination.

Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer.

The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density.

So how do you know if your breasts are dense?

It's also older women with dense tissue.

The next category is scattered fibroglandular densities, followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense.

But it was better in one group, and that was women under 50 who were pre menopausal and had dense breasts, and in those women, digital mammography found twice as many cancers, but it still only found 60 percent.

The problem with breast density is that it's truly the wolf in sheep's clothing.

There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause.

Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue, and we've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast.

In connection with this issue, the following numbers have been recorded (admissions and discharges) for malignant breast tumours

So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem.

But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast.

And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image.

Yes, breast cancer.

You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue.

A more recent British trial, performed on women aged 39 41, used only mammography, as did the largest of all, the Swedish two county trial. Though the trial results have been inconsistent, the conclusion is clear breast cancer screening does not reduce mortality rates.

And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors.

The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two centimeter tumor.

Early detection of breast cancer

We need to individualize screening based on density.

So, Red wine can help prevent breast cancer.

Curing Hereditary Breast Cancer

I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is.

I am not a breast cancer survivor.

And when, onscreen, Crystal got breast cancer, 75,000 more young women went to have mammographies done.