Researchers Recommend MRI for Supplemental Breast Cancer Screening

Researchers have shown that MRI screening can improve the early diagnosis of breast cancer for all women, not only those at high risk, and is a useful supplemental screening tool.

The study showed that women at average risk, and those with dense breast tissue, could benefit more from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as a supplemental screening tool than ultrasound.

The study was carried out by researchers at the University of Aachen and published online in the February 2017 issue of the journal Radiology.

Current guidelines limit MRI screening partly because of higher costs, however with the continued high levels of mortality in women from breast cancer improved screening methods are still necessary. MRI is also able of detecting more aggressive types of breast cancer that occur in women – also know as interval cancers – that may affect those with dense breast tissue.

Christiane Kuhl, MD, said, "The faster a cancer grows and the better it is in seeding metastases, the better will it be picked up early by MRI. In our cohort, cancers found by MRI alone exhibited features of rapid growth at pathology. The interval cancer rate in our study was zero percent. Not a single cancer was undetected that became palpable. This suggests that MRI finds breast cancers that also mammography would find, but MRI detects them earlier, and it finds the cancers which, if MRI had not been done, would have progressed to interval cancers."