‘Younger’ breast tissue may hamper mammograms

Today’s post-menopausal women have “younger” breast tissue than that of previous generations, a mammogram review has found.

Researchers said they could not account for the change but added that it might be partly because women are giving birth at a later age and having fewer children than 30 years ago. They discounted the effect of hormone replacement therapy because it wasn’t widely used in the Netherlands, where the study was conducted

Dense breast tissue, typical of younger woman, makes it more difficult to detect tumors or other abnormalities with mammograms and may be leading to unnecessary biopsies, said Dr. Fred van der Horst, a radiologist with the National Training and Expert Centre for Breast Cancer Screening in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He reviewed 2,000 mammograms randomly selected from those of 54,500 Dutch women who had been screened every two years.

According to results presented March 18 at the 4th European Breast Cancer Conference in Hamburg, Germany, one-fourth of women ages 50 to 69 had dense patterns, meaning that at least a quarter of their breasts were made up of dense tissue. Among women 50 to 54, the proportion with dense tissue patterns typical of younger breasts was 44%.

*

-- Jane E. Allen