Female Beauty

After finding that she has early-stage breast cancer, Giuliana Rancic, host of E! News, star of Giuliana and Bill tv show, and a fixture on Fashion Police, advised that all women get a mammogram before having IVF.
But is this sound advice?

Actually, not.

Younger women have denser breast tissue than older women, and so many small tumors are missed by the mammogram, while the mammograms often show things as cancer lumps that turn out to be not cancer at all.
This was the reason that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and The American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) both agree that women under 40 do not need a mammogram before starting IVF.

Dr. Eric Widra, an infertility specialist who chairs the assisted reproductive technology committee for the ASRM sums it up by saying. “There’s no evidence to suggest that women under 40 should be screened with mammography, and there’s no reason to treat women with infertility any differently. Women get pregnant at age 36 all the time without having mammograms and those who have IVF to get pregnant aren’t at any greater risk of getting breast cancer than any other pregnant woman.”

That said, we should note that some women DO have a higher risk – such as having, say, a BRCA gene mutation or relatives with the mutation – and are told to have screening earlier than other women.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 3:29 am and is filed under Celebrity News, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.