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| World Home » Life Style » | Mon. Sep 8, 2008 |
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New U.S. guidelines on MRI use for women at high risk of breast cancer MIL/IHT, Mar 29, 2007. March 29, 2007 - Two reports scheduled for publication in the United States on Wednesday call for greatly expanded use of magnetic resonance imaging for women who have breast cancer or who are at high risk of developing the disease. The recommendations on the scans, whose technology is commonly referred to as MRI, do not apply to most healthy women, who have only an average risk of developing breast cancer. But even so, the new guidelines could add a million or more women in the United States a year to those who need magnetic resonance imaging of the breasts - a demand that radiologists are not yet equipped to meet, researchers say. Breast MRI requires special equipment and software and trained radiologists to read the results. A scan costs $1,000 to $2,000 in the United States, sometimes more, which is 10 times the cost of mammography. So a million more scans a year could cost at least $1 billion. The scans are sometimes covered in the United States by insurance and Medicare, sometimes not, depending on the reason for the test. One of the reports scheduled for release Wednesday is a set of new U.S. guidelines for using MRI in women at high risk for breast cancer. The other is a study in The New England Journal of Medicine showing that in women who have newly diagnosed cancer in one breast, MRI can find tumors in the other breast that mammograms miss. MRI has drawbacks. It is so sensitive, much more so than mammography, that it reveals all sorts of suspicious growths in the breast, leading to many repeat scans and biopsies for things that turn out to be benign. For women who are likely to have hidden tumors, the prospect of such false-positive findings may be acceptable. But the risk of needless biopsies and additional scans is not generally considered reasonable for women with just an average risk of breast cancer, and is the main reason MRI is not recommended for them. Full Story: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/28/news/cancer.php
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