I came across this article and thought that we should all be aware of the latest technology that is available to us.

As reported by The Med Guru 

There is good news for those at a higher risk of breast cancerdefine, as technology advances have not brought forward a better tool for diagnosing breast cancer. Molecular Breast Imaging as it has been named, comes with a radioactive tracer, that illuminates the cancer cells hidden in dense breasts too, promising to be way ahead than the mammograms.

The MBI showed better diagnosis as compared to mammograms in dense breast tissue and revealed more number of tumours than a mammogramdefine did, with far less chances of false alarms.

The MBI is not meant for women at average risk of breast cancerdefine as for them, mammograms would suffice; however, it is just perfect for high risk women, who have dense breast tissue, making it hard to detect the existent malignancy through mammograms. It must be noted that this procedure gains all the more importance as almost one fourth of women, above the age of 40 have dense breast tissue and the risk of breast cancer increases around menopause.

Women considered to be on high risk are those with a family history of breast cancer or those genetically inclined to have the disease.

The best part about the MBI is the cost of conducting this test. Proving to be much cheaper than a simple MRIdefine, the MBI would thankfully go easy on the pocket, costing a little less than $500, as compared to the $1000 needed to be shelled out for an MRI.

In order to test the efficiency of MBI over mammograms, the researchers carried out tests using both on 940 women. The results were quite startling. In all 13 malignancies were detected, in 12 women. Out of these, 10 were detected by MBI and it missed out 3 of them. On the other hand, Mammograms were able to detect only 3(one was the tumour missed out by the MBI and the other two were detected by MBI as well.) missing out on 10 cancers. Thus, 11 tumours were detected in total and the 2 missed out by both methods came to light subsequently as time passed.

In addition to missing out on tumours the mammograms are known to give false alarms leading to many futile biopsies, which is not the case in MBI.

While mammograms are more like sophisticated X-rays, MBI technique uses an intravenous substance, which acts as a tracer. This tracer gets immediately absorbed by the culprit malignant cells and makes them glow. They can thus be detected by the radiologist using special cameras, enabling the spotting of the concerned area. The tracer is excreted by the body within one day.

“We all know that mammography is, in and of itself, an imperfect tool, and we clearly need to do better in the future,” said Dr. Eric Winer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston, a spokesman for the oncology.

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has been working on the MBI for the last six years. Their work was paid for by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which make the imaging agent used in MBI. The work is now ready to be present it at the American Society's Clinical Oncology conference in Washington, D.C.

Continuing the work further the researchers are now going to test the viability of MBI as against MRI. It already scores on the cost front, what remains to be seen is how better is it on the detection front. The further study would be funded by the federal government and would involve 120 high risk women.

Some facts on Breast cancer

•Breast cancer is the second most commonly found cancer in the world, the most common one being lung cancer.
•10.4% of all cancer incidences are breast cancer.
•It is the fifth most common cause of cancer death in the world.
•Every year UK finds 45,500 women diagnosed with breast cancer out of which 12,300 are likely to die from the disease.
•It is by far the most common cancer seen in women world over.
•In 2005, around 502,000 breast cancer deaths were reported world wide.