MRIs may detect breast cancer earlier

TORONTO, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- Canadian researchers advise women at high risk of breast cancer to get mammograms and a magnetic resonance imaging to detect cancers earlier.

The researchers at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center found cancer earlier among women who were screened with MRI versus those not screened with MRI. The cancer tumor size was smaller in the MRI group -- 0.9 cm versus 1.8 cm in the control group. In the MRI group only 3 percent were larger than 2 cm – versus 29 percent of those in the control group.

"These results will hopefully convince high-risk women and their healthcare providers that breast screening with yearly MRI and mammography is a reasonable alternative to surgical removal of their breasts, which is commonly done to prevent breast cancer," study lead researcher Dr. Ellen Warner said in a statement.

"We can be fairly confident that if screening with MRI finds cancers at a much earlier stage, it probably also saves lives."

Warner and colleagues screened 1,275 women at high risk for breast cancer because they had the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation either using MRI plus mammography or -- as a control using conventional mammography.

The findings were presented at the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center, the American Association for Cancer Research and Baylor College of Medicine San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.