Scientists find a way to detect which breast abnormalities may develop into cancer.(Brief Article)

2002 MAY 16 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Scientists at the Royal Liverpool University Hospitals in the U.K. have found a way of testing whether certain abnormalities in a woman's breast are likely to go on to develop into breast cancer. They presented their findings at the 3rd European Breast Cancer Conference in Barcelona.

Armed with information from the test, doctors could then consider whether the at-risk women should be offered prophylactic antiestrogen treatment such as tamoxifen or more frequent screening.

However, Dr. Abeer M. Shaaban, a specialist registrar in the hospital's department of cellular and molecular pathology, warned that, while the test itself was fairly straightforward to do, it might be many years before it could lead to the development of prophylactic treatments, especially as clinical trials are still being run to test the effectiveness of antiestrogens such as tamoxifen in preventing breast cancer.

Hyperplasia of usual type (HUT) is a benign abnormality in the breast. Although it is formed by cell proliferation, it is not cancer, but it is associated with a slightly increased risk of cancer developing subsequently. Women who have HUT have a risk of developing breast cancer of between 1.5 and 2 times that of the general population. Normally HUT cannot be detected by self-examination, and is usually spotted during screening and diagnosed following a biopsy.

Shaaban, working with Professor Christopher S. Foster, head of the hospital's pathology laboratories, studied 674 biopsies from a 20-year period between 1979 and 1999 to see whether those samples that belonged to ...