Trust your doctor's recommendation for additional breast-density testing.
For women, an annual mammogram is necessary to stay on top of their overall health. It can be a nerve-wracking time, especially when the results are inconclusive. Much duress can come from unfavorable or incomplete reports from your primary-care physician or specialist, so when your doctor says the breast tissue appears to be "dense," there might be another few tests that need to be done. Fortunately, two tests (cone-beam CT and breast MRI) have been studied, while a third (dual-energy mammography) has been useful in research.
Instructions
1. Inquire about a breast MRI if cone-beam CT scans are not available. This highly sensitive test can follow a typical mammography to evaluate suspicious breast lesions. This particular MRI can clue physicians to different areas of interest, including breast density and tumor type; it is not the end-all, be-all of testing for breast-tissue density.
2. Ask your doctor about a cone-beam breast CT. A team of researchers at the University of Texas's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has proven that, in less time (less than 60 seconds to be exact), cone-beam breast CT scanning can provide true three-dimensional images of breast tissue as well as overcome the problem of overlapping breast tissue.
3. Inquire about dual-energy mammography. This particular testing protocol can determine breast composition on three levels: water, lipid and protein. These three components can tell a physician about the breast-tissue density, which will clue them in to whether the tissue indicates breast cancer or nothing at all.
Tags: breast tissue, cone-beam breast, your doctor, breast-tissue density, dual-energy mammography, Inquire about, This particular
