Laura Newman, author of the Patient POV blog, has written about the dangers of reading too much into prostate cancer screening tests, and I have taken note of that here and here. In a post this week, she does the same for breast cancer screening–in particular, the screening of women with dense breasts.
According to Newman, such women have posed a tricky diagnostic problem, because dense breasts are a risk factor for developing breast cancer, and mammograms don't do a very good job of peering through dense tissue.
Should such women undergo further screening? Should they be examined with a newly approved breast ultrasound imaging system?
Newman sorts out the issues in the first of two posts.
-Paul Raeburn
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