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Nancy's Chalkboard: blogging and blabbing about breasts and whatever else Nancy fancies

Nancy's Chalkboard Blog

  • Talking Truth: Exposing A Hidden Harm of Mammography Screening

    My breast cancer diagnosis occurred not because of my faithful yearly mammograms but only when my cancer was large enough to be felt and hence progressed to an advanced stage, the opposite of what I was led to believe for more than a decade.

  • The Unmasking of Breast Cancer in Dense Breasts: The Elephant in the Examining Room

    With decades of scientific literature as evidence, we demanded the masking of cancer in dense breast tissue, hidden from the patient, would travel from the medical journals to the examining room, giving women an opportunity for personalized screening, based on their dense breast tissue, causal risks and individual preferences.

  • Going Nuclear After My Advanced Stage Breast Cancer Diagnosis: How My Physicians' Filibuster Led to Legislation

    Unknowingly, for more than a decade, I relinquished control of my breast health and breast screening to this powerful body of medical professionals. With their resounding ‘no’ to density disclosure, my health care team filibustered my request for truth, because they could. I was wronged and yet it had little significance to my health-care team.

  • Fake News: Having Dense Breast Tissue is No Big Deal

    The standard protocol, a one size fits all approach used for decades for breast screening, is placing women across the globe, who are already at risk of developing breast cancer, further at risk for a missed, delayed and advanced stage cancer which conveys worse survival outcomes.

Are You Dense? Fact #1: Breast density is one of the strongest predictors of the failure of mammography screening to detect cancer.

Are You Dense? Fact #2: Two-thirds of pre-menopausal women and 40% of post-menopausal women have dense breast tissue.

Are You Dense? Fact #3: Adding more sensitive tests to mammography significantly increase detection of invasive cancers that are small and node negative.

Are You Dense? Fact #4: American College of Radiology describes women with "Dense Breast Tissue" as having a higher than average risk of Breast Cancer.

Are You Dense? Fact #5: While a mammogram detects 98% of cancers in women with fatty breasts, it finds only 48% in women with dense breasts.

Are You Dense? Fact #6: A woman at average risk and a woman at high risk have an EQUAL chance of having their cancer masked by mammogram.

Are You Dense? Fact #7: Women with dense breasts who had breast cancer have a four times higher risk of recurrence than women with less-dense breasts.

Are You Dense? Fact #8: A substantial proportion of Breast Cancer can be attributed to high breast density alone.

Are You Dense? Fact #9: Cancer turns up five times more often in women with extremely dense breasts than those with the most fatty tissue.

Are You Dense? Fact #10: There are too many women who are unaware of their breast density, believe their “Happy Gram” when it reports no significant findings and are at risk of receiving a later stage cancer diagnosis.