Have you heard physicians tell you that you have dense breasts? Have you wondered what that really means?
We get this question quite a bit from our patients, so I would like to take a moment to describe what this
means and how it might effect women whose breasts are dense.
Breast tissue is composed of non-dense tissue (fat) and dense tissue (tissue with glands, ligaments and stromal tissue).
Density of the breast is an individual characteristic like height or hair color. Young women tend to have dense breasts and
older women tend to have more of a fatty, or low-density breast. Women often convert from dense to intermediate to low density
during the course of their lifetime, but it occurs at a different rate and at a different time for each woman.
Mammogram X-rays do not penetrate - or "see through" - dense tissues as well as they do through fat. So, in women with
dense breasts, mammograms are more difficult to interpret. Tumors also are dense tissue and appear as solid white areas
on the film. This can make it more difficult to detect a tumor in dense breasts because it looks a lot like the dense
tissue that surrounds it. A study published in 2005, however, found that digital mammography does a much better job
detecting cancer in dense breasts than does traditional mammography.
When you have your mammogram, you may have noticed that at times, our Tech may do "additional views" because the radiologist
wants to see a certain area in the breast more clearly. Repositioning and taking another "picture" from a different angle
is often done to distinguish overlapping normal breast tissue from a real lump. This is the most common reason additional views
are performed.
If you have dense breasts, it is even more important to do your monthly breast exams and to have a yearly breast examination by
your physician. Ultrasound can also help to detect lumps hidden by overlapping normal breast tissue on a mammogram.
If you have questions about your breast density, please be sure to ask us the next time you come in for your mammogram!
