The News
Cancer likelier in dense breasts
By Jeff Donn The Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 01/17/2007 08:38:32 PM MST

Boston - Cancer turns up five times as often in women with extremely dense breasts as in those with the most fatty tissue, a study shows, signaling the importance of a risk factor rarely discussed with patients. On mammograms, fat looks dark, but dense tissue is light, like tumors, so it can hide the cancers. But this study confirms that cancers are also more frequent - not just hidden - in women with dense breasts. That means that density is a true risk factor, along with other strong predictors such as age and the genes BRCA1 and 2. Yet specialists say that breast density is rarely considered with other risk factors in discussions between doctors and patients.

The Research
Read the research behind this story in the New England Journal of Medicine.