New scans prompt mastectomies for breast patients

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Breast cancer patients who get newer scans called magnetic resonance imaging are more likely to opt for mastectomies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

The patients who get mastectomies are not living any longer than those who get less radical surgery, the researchers said in preliminary results released ahead of a meeting later this month of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The findings suggest that MRIs, which are more sensitive than mammograms, are showing abnormalities that worry patients and doctors alike. They are then opting for total removal of the breast instead of having lumpectomies, in which just the tumor and surrounding tissue is removed.

Dr. Matthew Goetz and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, tracked 5,464 women who had surgery for early-stage breast cancer between 1997 and 2006.

In 2003 just 11 percent of patients got MRIs. By 2006, 22 percent did.

And mastectomy rates declined from 45 percent in 1997 to 30 percent in 2003, but then rose back to 43 percent in 2006.

More than half of the patients who got MRIs opted for mastectomy, compared with 38 percent of the patients who did not have MRIs.

"But the mastectomy rate went up for all women, including women who didn't get MRI," Goetz told reporters in a telephone briefing.