Radioactive way to spot breast cancer

   A fact to remember: About one in four women over 40 have dense breasts. (It's that aging process again!)

   Anyway, dense breasts are harder to test for breast cancer, as mammograms have a difficult time spotting tumors amid all that tissue.

   This week, however, a new type of test involving a radioactive tracer showed much promise, doctors said. The tracer, in essence, lights up the cancer hiding deep inside those dense breasts, much like how a flashlight shines light in a dark corner.

  The experimental method, six years in the making by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is called molecular breast imaging, or MBI. Researchers tested it on 940 women who had dense breasts and a high risk of cancer due to family history or other factors. (See the full story at MiamiHerald.com/health.)

Thirteen tumors were found in 12 women. The MBI found 8 of the 13 tumors; mammograms found only 1 of the 13!

I don't know about you, but if I'm going through all the trouble of getting a mammogram, I want to know a mammogram is going to find more than 1 of 13 tumors, or only 7 percent ! The MBI, by contrast, found 61 percent of the tumors.

Ok, there is a caveat - the new method has about 8 to 10 times the radiation of mammograms; they're working on lowering it.

But I'll take my chances. With breast cancer hitting 1 in 7 women - and two of my dear friends - modern medicine has got to do a better job of screening for breast cancer.

We owe it to our mothers, daughters, sisters and friends to fight for it.