Implants Can Impede Diagnosis

Breast implants make it harder to spot cancer in mammograms but there is no evidence that women with implants are being diagnosed with more advanced cases of the disease, researchers said Tuesday.

Mammograms detected breast cancer in slightly less than half of women with implants who had the disease but no symptoms, compared with a detection rate of two-thirds among women without implants, the researchers found.

There was no indication in the study of seven U.S. mammogram registries that women with breast implants were diagnosed with more severe cases of the disease that killed roughly 40,000 American women in 2002.

“Although the sensitivity of screening mammography is lower in asymptomatic women with breast augmentation, there is no evidence that this results in more advanced disease at diagnosis compared with women without augmentation,” study author Diana Miglioretti of the Group Health Cooperative in Seattle wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.