MILAN, Italy, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- An Italian study finds magnetic resonance imaging is better than mammography in detecting additional breast cancers in women who have the disease.
The Italian Trial for Breast MR in Multifocal/Multicentric Cancer included 90 breast cancer patients, some of whom had cancer in both breasts. Each woman had a mammogram and an MRI examination to determine if there were additional cancers.
Dr. Francesco Sardanelli, of the Istituto Policlinico San Donato and a professor at the University of Milan, said previous studies showed up to 42 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer in one breast have at least one other malignant lesion in that same breast.
In the study, mammography detected 124 malignant lesions, while MRI detected 152, Sardanelli said. All of the women had mastectomies and their breasts were examined by a pathologist, who found 188 malignancies.
Sardanelli said the malignancies missed by mammography were significantly larger and more aggressive overall than the malignant areas missed by MRI.
