Technique May Find Breast Cancer Before It's Even Cancer
June 10, 2000 (Atlanta) -- Scientists believe they are close to developing a new technique that may allow them to detect breast cancer nearly a decade before the current method of screening -- mammography -- could find the cancer. The procedure, currently in the early stages of development, could revolutionize breast cancer screening and save thousands of lives.
Last year, breast cancer was diagnosed in about 175,000 women, and experts say that early detection is the key to survival. Currently, doctors recommend breast exams and mammography to detect early breast cancers.
However, eight to 10 years before a cancer can be spotted on a mammogram, there already are dangerous changes in cells of the breast's milk ducts that start at the nipple and radiate outward.
In this latest research, scientists not only have been able to visualize and map the pathways of the milk ducts for the first time, but they also were able to develop a minor, painless procedure that can collect cells from the ducts.
Why the milk ducts? Because that's where all breast cancer develops, says Susan M. Love, MD, adjunct professor of surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"What we now call early detection of breast cancer is not early detection," says Love, who also is the lead researcher of the study. She says that if doctors can detect the ominous changes in the breast earlier -- sort of like a Pap smear (used to detect cancer of the cervix) for breast cancer -- even more lives could be saved.
Love described the findings here Saturday at the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Meeting, a conference in which the military, doctors, scientists, breast cancer survivors, and advocates equally participate in promoting cutting-edge research on the disease.
In her study, Love and her colleagues examined the nipples of almost 220 women. They found that, on average, a woman has six to nine ducts on each breast, and each duct had its own pattern -- much like that of a meandering river.
Then the scientists developed a technique to retrieve cells from the ducts, using a tiny tube inserted just a few millimeters into the nipple.