Source: Reuters Health
There are many reasons women dislike mammograms, chief among them the awkward and often painful process of having their breasts squashed by a technician into a machine that flattens them for the images.
But a trial in France suggests that breast cancer screening might be just as effective and less unpleasant when women can control the compression device themselves.
“Our study did not report any decrease in image quality when self-compression was performed,” said lead study author Dr. Philippe Henrot of the Institut de Cancerologie de Lorraine Alexis Vautrin in Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy.
For the study, researchers randomly assigned 548 women to either get mammograms that allowed them to place their breasts in the machines and control the compression themselves, or to get traditional mammograms with radiologists positioning women’s breasts.
The goal of compressing the breast is to make it as thin as possible so radiologists get a more detailed two-dimensional image that can make it easier to spot any abnormalities that might be cancer.
Two things can go wrong when the breast isn’t compressed enough in the mammogram machine. Either healthy tissues overlap in ways that make it appear as if there are potentially cancerous abnormalities and women get unnecessary invasive follow-up tests, or a real tumor is hidden behind healthy tissue and goes undetected.
In the current study, however, when women compressed their own breasts in the machine, they achieved breast thickness that was within 3 millimeters of what women typically had with the traditional mammogram process. That difference is too small to suggest that self-compression isn’t as good as traditional mammograms, the study authors conclude in JAMA Internal Medicine.
In fact, the researchers found that women compressed their own breasts a little bit more, on average, than radiologists did when they controlled the machines. But women also reported less pain when they handled compression themselves.
“Despite knowing the utility of mammograms, many women dread having this exam, because it can be uncomfortable or painful,” Henrot said by email. “Self-compression could be proposed as an alternative in women who dread having a mammogram.”
Read the full article here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-mammography/with-self-compression-women-suffer-less-and-mammogram-quality-not-at-all-idUSKCN1PU2E8
