Not all women with dense breasts need extra tests. Dense breast tissue can serve as a barrier to detecting cancer since it can hide growths normally picked up on mammogram. But new research has found that not all of those women necessarily need extra tests to make up for the screening troubles. “The study findings come from 365,426 women ages 40 to 74. The researchers wanted to know if they could detect whether, among all the women with dense breasts, any subgroups had a higher risk than others of developing an ‘interval’ cancer found less than a year after a normal mammogram. They used an online calculator to estimate a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer in the next five years. The study found that women with certain combinations of breast density and five-year risk levels had the highest odds of an interval cancer. Two groups had high rates of interval cancer, defined as more than one per 1,000 mammograms. One group included women with a five-year risk of 1.67% or higher and extremely dense breasts. The second group had a five-year risk of 2.5% or higher and ‘heterogeneously dense’ findings on mammography.” The researchers hope their findings will prompt more in-depth conversations between doctors and patients about what a woman’s real risk for cancer is and which tests are really going to make a difference in their care.

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