Dense Breast Screening Guide

Your breasts contain several different types of tissue. Glandular tissue holds all your milk ducts, connective (fibrous) tissue holds all of your glandular and fatty tissues, and fatty tissue fills in the gaps and determines your breast size. 

Breasts come in all shapes and sizes, but they also have varying amounts of each type of tissue. Some women’s breasts contain mostly fatty tissue, but others contain mostly connective tissue, which is referred to as having “dense breasts.” 

You can’t tell if you have dense breasts by how they look or feel. The only way to categorize your breasts as dense is through a mammogram. It’s important to know if you have dense breasts or not, because dense breasts are more prone to cancerous growths, and the high amount of connective tissue makes it difficult to spot abnormal tissue.

Screening for breast cancer is an important part of women’s health care, and that process can look a little different when you have dense breasts. At Women’s Specialty Care in Lake Forest and Grayslake, Illinois, Karen Mass, MD, FACOG, leads our team in offering automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) technology to better screen dense breasts for cancer. 

This month’s blog discusses everything you need to know about screening for cancer when you have dense breasts. 

Why screening dense breasts for cancer is difficult

When you get a mammogram, low-dose X-rays are sent to your breasts in order to produce images of the breast tissues. Any abnormal tissues or growths appear white on the produced images.

Fatty tissue appears black on mammogram images, making any abnormal growths easy to spot. However, connective tissue also appears white on mammograms. This means that it’s easy to get a false mammogram test result because regular connective tissue could be identified as abnormal, or abnormal growths could be hiding behind the normal tissues. 

So, if you have dense breasts, it’s incredibly important to get supplemental breast cancer screenings with ABUS technology. 

How ABUS works for dense breast cancer screening

You may not learn that your breasts are dense until you get a mammogram for the first time. If our team categorizes your breasts as dense, they’ll let you know the amount of connective tissue your breasts have. The higher the amount of connective tissue, the denser your breasts are, and the harder mammograms are to read. 

If your breasts aren’t extremely dense, typical mammograms may be able to give us all the information we need to confirm or deny the presence of abnormal growths. Even if you have extremely dense breasts, you still need to undergo regular mammograms. However, you’ll most likely need supplemental testing. 

ABUS technology (along with a 3D mammogram) allows us to capture hundreds of images of breast tissue, which includes almost the entirety of your breast. This provides us with information that’s incredibly thorough, ensuring we don’t miss any cancerous growths.

If you have extremely dense breasts, we recommend that you get annual mammograms that we may supplement with ABUS and 3D mammograms, depending on our findings. 

For expert breast cancer screening and mammography, look no further than our Women’s Specialty Care team. Schedule an appointment with us by calling your nearest office location or using our online booking feature today.