'We desperately need a ‘no treatment’ trial for DCIS', says Clive Wells, Chairman of the European Working Group on Breast Cancer Pathology, and London Regional Co-ordinator for the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) National Breast Cancer Screening Programme. Interview: Frank Swain
Expert estimates suggest that women eating more poultry, fish, nuts and legumes and less red meat might have lower risk.
Mammography scans with lower dose and higher contrast – that’s the declared goal of Dr Nik Hauser, Medical Director of the Women‘s Clinic and Director of the Interdisciplinary Breast Centre at Kantonsspital Baden, Switzerland, and Professor Marco Stampanoni of Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland.
US-American researchers have shown that positron emission tomography (PET), a tried procedure, is a helpful modality to detect breast cancer.
Created by the Dutch industrialist family Hilekes, in 1993 Medicor expanded beyond the Benelux countries to enter the German-speaking world as Medicor Germany GmbH, selling contrast media injectors for CT, MRI and angiography.
Digital breast tomosynthesis offers a number of benefits over other modalities but challenges remain in its optimum clinical application.
Breast cancer hurt her but after a long treatment, she is now 10 years past the day she heard "You have cancer."
Toshiba ultrasound equipment is helping provide a better oncological and cosmetic outcome for women recovering from breast cancer treatment and surgery. Daniela Zimmermann discussed intraoperative ultrasound-guided breast surgery with surgeon Dr Monique Petrousjka van den Tol, from the Department of Surgical Oncology, VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
In France, every year 15,000 women undergo complete or partial mastectomy due to breast cancer. Only about a third of them, i.e. around 5,000 patients, use the possibilities reconstructive surgery offers and 70 percent of those women opt for an implant although it is associated with a risk of infection because the body might react negatively to the foreign object.
New business ventures, new systems – and those include 3-D mammography
With 350,000 mammography screenings annually, Unilabs Sweden finds itself on the leading edge for research in mammography and pioneering patient education programmes. John Brosky reports
Times may be tough, but GE Healthcare takes a longer term view, believing innovative technologies can transform healthcare delivery and help improve patient care.
An artificial “brain” built by a 17-year-old whiz kid from Florida is able to accurately assess tissue samples for signs of breast cancer, providing more confidence to a minimally invasive procedure. The cloud-based neural network took top prize in this year’s Google Science Fair.
The European Congress of Radiology (ECR), the annual meeting of the die European Society of Radiology (ESR), started on Thursday in Vienna. 20,000 visitors are expected to participate in the congress which is one of the largest healthcare events worldwide.
In Europe, 350,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer annually. About 90% of them can be cured if the cancer is detected at a very early stage. To improve early detection almost all European countries have gradually initiated regional screening programmes, even though the benefits are discussed controversially from time to time.
Two years ago Dr Michael Michell and team at King’s College Hospital, London, set out to explore the benefits of tomosynthesis over conventional 2-D mammography. Their study has shown advantages in diagnostic accuracy and indicates that tomosynthesis could help to reduce the number of patient recalls for further examination and thus anxiety among women.
‘As we become more successful in the early detection and treatment of breast cancer, we tend to trivialise it. Yet one in 9 women still get breast cancer. Half of them become depressed, their partners don’t know how to react and their families are in disarray. We need to stop trivialising breast cancer. It kills women.’ So says Dr Fabienne Liebens, Head of the Saint-Pierre Hospital’s…
Expert warns that breast screening across the country needs to undergo a dramatic transformation over the next 15 years, Mark Nicholls reports.
The daily management of around 700 examinations within the national mammography screening programme keeps Dr Ilse Vejborg and her team at Rigshospitalet pretty busy. ‘We have the largest screening unit in Denmark with 200,000 women aged 50-69 years in the target group invited for an examination every second year,’ she explains.
Films with vivid 3-D images draw millions to cinemas – regardless of the plot. This technology, which is based on a stereoscopic effect, is not only entertaining but also medically relevant, as demonstrated by the Amulet three-dimensional digital mammography system produced by Fujifilm.
Yes, it’s in beautiful Dresden again and -- as in 2006 when the city last hosted the Congress of the German Society for Senology -- this year’s Congress President is Professor Rüdiger Schulz-Wendtland (Department of Radiology, University of Erlangen). However, the repetition ends there; the congress topics will be anything but repeated. Report: Meike Lerner
Dr Bill Svensson believes that elastography has the potential to improve diagnosis of breast cancer, reduce the number of false positives in the detection of the condition and also lead to fewer biopsies performed as accuracy of imaging improves further. This June he highlighted the potential of elastography and the developments in the imaging modality at two sessions at the United Kingdom…
Oestrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer, remains hard to treat despite major advances in surgery and adjuvant therapies. The latest results from a Swedish study [Pub: Breast Cancer Res. 2011 May 14;13(3):R49] suggest that a high daily intake of coffee -- more than five cups -- is associated with a statistically significant decrease in ER-negative breast cancer among postmenopausal women…
Every medical congress is an opportunity for the manufacturers to showcase their products. This year’s congress of the German Röntgen Society was no exception -- and one innovation particularly caught the attention of our European Hospital team: positron emission mammography, PEM for short.
Although powerful, new, targeted treatments are regularly introduced to cancer clinics, choices for the first-line treatment of invasive breast cancer normally lie between preventive surgery and chemotherapy. A recent American study used genomic prediction combining multiple signatures to determine outcomes to standard chemotherapy.