Why wait – be proactive now.
“Mammography should be individually adapted”
Question your Radiologist, Breast Screening Practitioner at your next Mammogram, don’t even wait until then, ask your GP –
Look them square in the eye and ask
- “If you saw your wife’s, sister’s daughter’s or Mother’s Mammogram showed she had Dense Breasts, would you tell her?”
- “Would you make sure she had an Ultrasound or MRI?” OR
- “Would you allow her to depend on the current 2D standard of Mammogram screening care knowing Cancer could be growing undetected in her Dense Breast Tissue?”
Beingdense.com actively advocates for Breast Density notification for All women and at the time of the woman’s Mammogram written report, a copy of which should be given directly to the woman.
Dense mammary tissue is one of the strongest risk factors for breast cancer and its density also makes it more difficult to detect the cancer. This causes the care to miss every two cases of breast cancer in so-called dense breasts. Now researchers and experts want to customize screening for breast cancer and inform about dense breasts.
Latest on Breast Density from Sweden
Greater risk of cancer in dense breasts – tumors are not visible on mammography
Health care misses every other case of breast cancer in so-called dense breasts. Now scientists and experts want to see changed guidelines and new methods for breast cancer screening. Photo: Christine Olsson / TT
The Swedish mammography program was groundbreaking and since its inception in the 1990s has contributed to doubling the survival rate in breast cancer. Now, two decades later, Swedish research and new knowledge show that it is high time to upgrade to breast cancer screening 2.0. We want new routines to be introduced where the survey is tailored based on each woman’s overall risk of breast cancer and that women with dense breasts are screened with better-suited methods than today. The way forward for early detection of breast cancer is individualized screening.
I have been blogging since 2016 on this issue. To tell a woman or not, it’s 2019, HELL YES! For pity sake tell us. We want to know. Ask any woman and you will get a resounding YES.
Giving women information about their Breast Density routinely could mean early detection of small node negative Breast cancers.
In Ireland Breast Density information is NOT routinely shared with women, this cannot be in a woman’s best interest.
Given the experiences that have been exposed in our Cervical Check system, we ask why does this culture of non disclosure prevail with regard to Breast Density notification and Breast Health.
Irish Times September 2018
Scally has shown up a noxious current in Irish medicine in all its arrogant swagger
Miriam Lord: Scally report exposes a heartless, paternalistic culture
Page 20, chapter four, paragraph ten: one stark, matter-of-fact observation. A brisk sentence easily lost among the competing pages of extraordinary quotes, uncomfortable detail and damning conclusions.
It reads like a line from a textbook on Irish medical history, mislaid at the printers and inadvertently dropped into the Scally report on the cervical cancer scandal.
“There was a period when women’s health was taken very seriously.”
When might that have been? (Hint: it’s not now.)
During the Brehon Laws?
In the wake of Catholic Emancipation?
When the men marched off to war?
No. It was in 1997, writes Dr Gabriel Scally, “when the then health minister established the Women’s Health Council with a remit to advise the minister, and other ministers, on all aspects of women’s health”. This council had a long and comprehensive list of functions.
As time went by it was decided that this council should be “integrated” into the Department of Health and the HSE. After years of huffing and puffing, this was supposedly achieved in 2008.
“It is probably more accurate to refer to it as having been a ‘disappearance’ rather than a ‘merger’ ”, Scally tartly concludes.
He says it would be “presumptuous” of him to recommend its return, but he wants to see “women’s health issues” given serious and consistent attention once again.
He wants Ireland, in the year 2018, to bring back those halcyon days when the health of Irish women was “taken very seriously” by the people who call the shots in the medical system.
In this day and age, that’s astonishing.
And what’s equally astonishing is that the Government and the Minister for Health have solemnly pledged to act on this recommendation and make sure that the health issues of half the adult population are now afforded proper consideration.
Because the concerns of women, as the appalling treatment of the cervical cancer patients in Scally’s report demonstrates, are too easily and routinely overlooked.
It is beyond irresponsible and reprehensible to withold information about any woman’s Mammogram and radiology determination on Breast Density, especially in light of what is widely known about Breast Density and Breast Cancer risk. This is happening each and every day and must be challenged.
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