Brest Cancer: How dense you are

Find out how dense you are

One of the newest ways to protect yourself is to learn whether you have dense breasts. When you have more tissue than fat in your breasts—which is common in younger women—it makes cancer harder to detect on a mammogram: Both tumors and breast tissue show up white, while fat looks dark. Even more important, having dense breasts makes your cancer risk up to 6 times higher. Experts aren't sure why that is, but one possibility is the fact that there is no standardization for measurement of breast density, so doctors' scores are subjective.

As of this past year, at least 13 states (Alabama, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) require clinics that perform mammograms to inform patients of their breast density scores; two states (Utah and Maine) allow voluntary notification and more states are expected to follow suit.

In the meantime, ask the radiologist who does your mammogram whether your breasts are dense. If your density is low, you still need regular checkups. 

If it's high, there's nothing you can do to lower it (though breast density does tend to decrease with age), but you can protect yourself by asking your doctor about adding MRI or ultrasound to your screening regimen, or switching from traditional mammography to digital, which is higher in contrast, making it easier to see abnormalities in dense breast tissue.