Carol Webb: What women need to know about their cancer risk

Pink breakfasts support breast cancer awareness but Carol Webb has another warning.

COMMENT

Many Whanganui women and their mothers, daughters, sisters and friends will, like me, have been diagnosed with breast cancer within weeks or months of a regular taxpayer-funded mammogram courtesy Breast Screen Aotearoa (BSA).

They will all know the shock and incomprehension as it sinks in that they face likely radical surgery and ongoing debilitating treatment, with a huge cloud over their future survival, despite believing that their two-yearly mammograms were keeping them safe by identifying tumours at an early stage.

Yet that simply doesn't apply to up to 50 per cent of us who have dense breast tissue.

September 25 is #densebreastday which signals a yearly social media blitz in the US to educate women about the perils of putting their faith in mammogram providers, despite never being told about their own breast tissue density.

Imagine you're one of the 257 passengers on that Air NZ plane that flew into whiteout conditions in Antarctica in 1979, because that's what your mammogram looks like to BSA radiologists.

If you're one of the 10 per cent with extremely dense or the 40 per cent with heterogeneously dense breasts you may well have an Erebus-sized tumour hiding in that whiteout.

If you leave it to the "free" screening programme that your taxes pay for, your family and friends may well end up mourning your loss just as we remember and mourn the Erebus whiteout victims 40 years after that disaster.

In my experience, BSA, acting at the command of its Ministry of Health masters at the National Screening Unit (NSU) in Wellington, does not tell women in Whanganui and around New Zealand what is blindingly obvious to its radiologists after every mammogram we undergo.

However, 38 US states have laws mandating providers to every tell women whom they know to have dense breast tissues the truth and most must advise them to seek further diagnostic tests that can reliably "see" tumours regardless of the amount of dense tissue.

Not only does tissue density, caused by fibroglandular tissue, mask our tumours on mammogram films of the "Box-Brownie" age technology used by BSA cameras, it also significantly increases our risk of developing and growing tumours.

You can find out if you're one of those at much higher risk than women with "normal" fatty breasts by getting an ultrasound, MRI or new-era 3D mammogram like those at Broadway Radiology private clinic in Palmerston North.

Of course, if you're aged 45-69 you could ask the radiographer about your density status at your next mammogram, but in my opinion, you can't expect the correct answer either then or in the letter you'll likely receive about a week later telling you there was "no evidence of breast cancer".

In my opinion, the thousands of victims, past and future, of this deadly situation deserve nothing less than a Commission of Inquiry like that into Erebus Flight 901.