Screening breast MRI in high-risk women

There is a landmark article from a group of Dutch authors in this week's New England Journal of Medicine regarding the usefulness of screening breast MRI as compared to mammography in women at high-risk for developing breast cancer. This population includes 398 women with genetic predisposition.

Their results: 'We screened 1909 eligible women, including 358 carriers of germ-line mutations. Within a median follow-up period of 2.9 years, 51 tumors (44 invasive cancers, 6 ductal carcinomas in situ, and 1 lymphoma) and 1 lobular carcinoma in situ were detected. The sensitivity of clinical breast examination, mammography, and MRI for detecting invasive breast cancer was 17.9 percent, 33.3 percent, and 79.5 percent, respectively, and the specificity was 98.1 percent, 95.0 percent, and 89.8 percent, respectively."

The accompanying editorial also puts this data in perspective by comparing it with other previous data.

This is one more study that ups the ante on the use of breast MRI routinely for specific indications.