The Christine E. Lynn Women’s Health and Wellness Institute at Boca Raton Regional Hospital is one of 10 leading clinical centers in the country to have participated in a new breast ultrasound study.
The study was conducted among women with dense breast tissue over a three and one-half years. Nearly 10 per cent of the nation’s breast ultrasounds in the study were conducted at the institute.
Based on the study, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s radiological devices panel of the medical devices advisory committee unanimously recommended approval of U-System’s somov® Automated Breast Ultrasound System for use in women with dense breast tissue who had a normal screening mammogram.
The government panel recognized the limitations of mammography in women with dense breast tissue, and that by adding whole breast ultrasound, the cancer detection rate can be doubled in this population of women.
“Recently, several scientific studies have demonstrated that supplementing mammography with ultrasound for women with dense breasts finds a statistically significant number of additional cancers,” said Kathy Schilling, MD, medical director of the institute. For women aged 40 and older, mammography has traditionally been the most important tool for the early detection of breast cancer. But for women who have dense breast tissue, the procedure has known limitation in detecting cancers. Dense breast tissue not only increases the risk of breast cancer up to four to six times, but also makes cancer more difficult to detect via mammography, according to multiple large studies.
One study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed 35 percent of breast cancer goes undetected by mammography in women with dense breasts, as density masks appearance of tumors.
— Staff report
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