When should breast ultrasound be used as part of mammography screening? It’s often used in cases of dense breast tissue, but other factors should also come into play, say researchers in a new study in Cancer.
Conventional X-ray mammography has difficulties when used for screening women with dense breast tissue, so supplemental modalities like ultrasound and MRI are called into play. But focusing too much on breast density alone could mean that many women who are at high risk of breast cancer don’t get the additional imaging they need.
To study this issue, researchers analyzed the risk of mammography screening failures (defined as interval invasive cancer or advanced cancer) in ~825k screening mammograms in ~377k women, and more than ~38k screening ultrasound studies in ~29k women. All exams were acquired from 2014 to 2020 at 32 healthcare facilities across the US.
Researchers then compared the mammography failure rate in women who got ultrasound and mammography to those who got mammography alone. Their findings included:
- Ultrasound was appropriately targeted at women with heterogeneously or extremely dense breasts, with 95.3% getting scans
- However, based on their complete risk factor profile, women with dense breasts who got ultrasound had only a modestly higher risk of interval breast cancer compared to women who only got mammography (23.7% vs. 18.5%)
- More than half of women undergoing ultrasound screening had low or average risk of an interval breast cancer based on their risk factor profile, despite having dense breasts
- The risk of advanced cancer was very close between the two groups (32.0% vs. 30.5%), suggesting that a large fraction of women at risk of advanced cancer are getting only mammography screening with no supplemental imaging
The Takeaway
On the positive side, ultrasound is being widely used in women with dense breast tissue, indicating success in identifying these women and getting them the supplemental imaging they need. But the high rate of advanced cancer in women who only received mammography indicates that consideration of other risk factors – such as family history of breast cancer and body mass index – is necessary beyond just breast tissue density to identify women in need of supplemental imaging.
