Category: Lab Tests and Imaging

Categories : Lab Tests and Imaging NeurologyTags :

AI-based CT Scans of the Brain can Nearly Match MRI

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A new artificial intelligence (AI)-based method can provide as much information on subtle neurodegenerative changes in the brain captured by computed tomography (CT) as compared to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The method, reported in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, could enhance diagnostic support, particularly in primary care, for conditions such as dementia and other brain disorders.

Compared to MRI, which requires powerful superconducting magnetics and their associated cryogenic cooling, computed tomography (CT) is a relatively inexpensive and widely available imaging technology. CT is considered inferior to MRI when it comes to reproducing subtle structural changes in the brain or flow changes in the ventricular system. Certain imaging must therefore currently be carried out by specialist departments at larger hospitals equipped with MRI.

AI trained on MRI images

Created with deep learning, a form of AI, the software has been trained to transfer interpretations from MRI images to CT images of the same brains. The new software can provide diagnostic support for radiologists and other professionals who interpret CT images.

“Our method generates diagnostically useful data from routine CT scans that, in some cases, is as good as an MRI scan performed in specialist healthcare,” says Michael Schöll, a professor at Sahlgrenska Academy who led the work involved in the study, carried out in collaboration with researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the National University of Singapore, and Lund University

“The point is that this simple, quick method can provide much more information from examinations that are already carried out on a routine basis within primary care, but also in certain specialist healthcare investigations. In its initial stage, the method can support dementia diagnosis, however, it is also likely to have other applications within neuroradiology.”

Reliable decision-making support

This is a well-validated clinical application of AI-based algorithms, and has the potential to become a fast and reliable form of decision-making support that effectively reduces the number of false negatives. The researchers believe that this solution can improve diagnostics in primary care, optimising patient flow to specialist care.

“This is a major step forward for imaging diagnosis,” says Meera Srikrishna, a postdoctor at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the study.

“It is now possible to measure the size of different structures or regions of the brain in a similar way to advanced analysis of MRI images. The software makes it possible to segment the brain’s constituent parts in the image and to measure its volume, even though the image quality is not as high with CT.”

Applications for other brain diseases

The software was trained on images of 1117 people, all of whom underwent both CT and MRI imaging. The current study mainly involved healthy older individuals and patients with various forms of dementia. Another application that the team is now investigating is for normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).

With NPH, the team has obtained new results indicating that the method can be used both during diagnosis and to monitor the effects of treatment. NPH is a condition that occurs particularly in older people, whereby fluid builds up in the cerebral ventricular system and results in neurological symptoms. About two percent of all people over the age of 65 are affected. Because diagnosis can be complicated and the condition risks being confused with other diseases, many cases are likely to be missed.

“NPH is difficult to diagnose, and it can also be hard to safely evaluate the effect of shunt surgery to drain the fluid in the brain,” continues Michael. “We therefore believe that our method can make a big difference when caring for these patients.”

The software has been developed over the course of several years, and development is now continuing in cooperation with clinics in Sweden, the UK, and the US together with a company, which is a requirement for the innovation to be approved and transferred to healthcare.

Source: University of Gothenburg

Categories : Lab Tests and ImagingTags :

New Technique Enhances Clarity of Photoacoustic Imaging in Dark Skin

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In photoacoustic imaging, laser light is pulsed through the skin into tissues, which release ultrasound signals with which the internal structure can be imaged. This works well for people with light skin but has trouble getting clear pictures from patients with darker skin. A Johns Hopkins University-led team found a way to deliver clear pictures of internal anatomy, regardless of skin tone. Their technique is described in the journal Photoacoustics.

In experiments the new imaging technique produced significantly sharper images for all people – and excelled with darker skin tones. It produced much clearer images of arteries running through the forearms of all participants, compared to standard imaging methods where it was nearly impossible to distinguish the arteries in darker-skinned individuals.

“When you’re imaging through skin with light, it’s kind of like the elephant in the room that there are important biases and challenges for people with darker skin compared to those with lighter skin tones,” said co-senior author Muyinatu “Bisi” Bell, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins. “Our work demonstrates that equitable imaging technology is possible.”

“We show not only there is a problem with current methods but, more importantly, what we can do to reduce this bias,” Bell said.

The findings advance a 2020 report that showed pulse oximeters, which measure oxygen rates in the blood, have higher error rates in Black patients.

“There were patients with darker skin tones who were basically being sent home to die because the sensor wasn’t calibrated toward their skin tone,” Bell said.

Bell’s team created a new algorithm to process information from photoacoustic imaging, a method that combines ultrasound and light waves to render medical images. Body tissue absorbing this light expands, producing subtle sound waves that ultrasound devices turn into images of blood vessels, tumours, and other internal structures. But in people with darker skin tones, melanin absorbs more of this light, which yields cluttered or noisy signals for ultrasound machines.

The team was able to filter the unwanted signals from images of darker skin, in the way a camera filter sharpens a blurry picture, to provide more accurate details about the location and presence of internal biological structures.

The researchers are now working to apply the new findings to breast cancer imaging, since blood vessels can accumulate in and around tumours. Bell believes the work will improve surgical navigation as well as medical diagnostics.

“We’re aiming to mitigate, and ideally eliminate, bias in imaging technologies by considering a wider diversity of people, whether it’s skin tones, breast densities, body mass indexes – these are currently outliers for standard imaging techniques,” Bell said. “Our goal is to maximise the capabilities of our imaging systems for a wider range of our patient population.”

Source: John Hopkins University

Categories : Cancer Lab Tests and ImagingTags :

Studies Point to New, Better Ways to Monitor Head and Neck Cancer Recurrence

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Early findings of a pair of studies from the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center shed light on new ways to anticipate recurrence in HPV-positive head and neck cancer sooner. The papers, published in Cancer and Oral Oncology, offer clinical and technological perspectives on how to measure if recurrence is happening earlier than current blood tests allow, and provide a framework for a new, more sensitive blood test that could help in this monitoring.

“When metastatic head and neck cancer returns, it impacts their quality of life and can be disfiguring, interfering with the ability to talk, swallow, and even breathe,” said Paul Swiecicki, MD, associate medical director for the Oncology Clinical Trials Support Unit at Rogel. “As of now, there’s no test to monitor for its recurrence except watching for symptoms or potentially using a blood test which may not detect cancer until shortly before it clinically recurs.”

The paper in Cancer aims to identify different clinical ways that providers can more strategically track for recurrence. To do this, Swiecicki and his team needed to first understand what patient population was at the highest risk to then figure out an appropriate monitoring pattern.

The team examined 450 patients with metastatic head and neck cancer, including people with HPV-positive and HPV-negative cancer. HPV-positive cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus and is increasingly more common in head and neck cancer patients. The team identified some predictors of when recurrences would happen, and to what organs the recurrent cancer would most commonly spread. Patients with HPV-positive cancers were found to develop recurrent disease significantly later than those that were HPV-negative, and also were more likely to spread to the lungs. Taken together, these characteristics may help create a “surveillance” method in the future that combines routine blood testing and imaging to hopefully catch these recurrences and intervene before it’s incurable.

Swiecicki is quick to mention that, at this point, the results of this study are largely theoretical and provide a helpful framework to direct further research. That’s where the newly developed blood test, highlighted in Oral Oncology, comes into play.

Current blood biomarker tests which test for pieces of tumour-shed DNA, may not be sensitive enough to detect a recurrence significantly earlier than clinical surveillance, though several studies with multiple types of tests are ongoing. A research team, led by Muneesh Tewari, MD, PhD, Swiecicki and Chad Brenner, PhD, aimed to create a highly sensitive blood test to detect cancer even when a smaller number of DNA fragments were present, with the intention of providing a better option for detecting cancer earlier in patients.

Not only is this test more sensitive and able to detect a smaller number of DNA fragments in blood, but it’s innovative in other ways too, says first author Chandan Bhambhani, PhD: “We achieved this level of sensitivity by looking for nine different pieces of the HPV genome DNA all at once,” Bhambhani says.

Tewari says this is a step towards a more proactive approach to tackling recurrence in head and neck cancer. “As of now, we only have the tools to react to symptoms when they recur. We want to find a way to be able to detect what’s causing the symptoms much, much sooner, even before the symptoms appear.”

As a clinician, Swiecicki agrees. “It’s exciting to have the ability to potentially detect cancer before it’s incurable and offer us a window for clinical trials to see if we could intervene on cancer to help give people both a better quality of life and perhaps longer quality of life, and even convert their disease from incurable to curable. We don’t know if that’s the case yet, but this is the first tool needed for that to develop.”

Source: Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan

Categories : Cardiovascular Disease Lab Tests and ImagingTags :

MRI Scan Combination Could Detect Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Early

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Combining two types of heart scan techniques could help detect hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) before symptoms and signs on conventional tests appear, according to a new study led by UCL researchers. To do this, they used two cutting-edge heart scanning techniques: cardiac diffusion tensor imaging (cDTI), which shows the heart’s microstructure and cardiac MRI perfusion (perfusion CMR), which reveals microvascular disease. Their findings, published in Circulation, will help doctors select appropriate treatments.

HCM is a disease which affects around 1 in 500 in the UK, causing thickening of heart muscle and can lead to heart failure and cardiac arrest.

Researchers studied the hearts of three groups: healthy people, people who already had HCM, and people with an HCM-causing genetic mutation but no overt signs of disease.

The scans showed that people with overt signs of HCM have very abnormal organisation of their heart muscle cells and a high rate and severity of microvascular disease compared to healthy volunteers, helping doctors more accurately spot the early signs of HCM.

Crucially, the scans were also able to identify abnormal microstructure and microvascular disease in the people who had a problematic gene but no symptoms or muscle thickening. They found that 28% had defects in their blood supply, compared to healthy volunteers. This meant that doctors were able to more accurately spot the early signs of HCM developing in patient’s hearts.

The first drug to slow HCM progression, mavacamten, has recently been approved for use in Europe and will allow doctors to reduce the severity of the disease once symptoms and muscle thickening have appeared. Genetic therapies are also in development which could prevent symptoms entirely by intercepting HCM development at an early stage.

Perfusion CMR is already being used in some clinics to help differentiate people with HCM from other causes of muscle thickening. The researchers think that these revolutionary new therapies, combined with cDTI and perfusion CMR scans, give doctors the best ever chance of treating people at risk of HCM early enough that the condition never develops.

Dr George Joy, who led the research with Professor James Moon and Dr Luis Lopes (all UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science), said: “The ability to detect early signs of HCM could be crucial in trials testing treatments aimed at preventing early disease from progressing or correcting genetic mutations. The scans could also enable treatment to start earlier than we previously thought possible.

“We now want to see if we can use the scans to identify which patients without symptoms or heart muscle thickening are most at risk of developing severe HCM and its life-changing complications. The information provided from scans could therefore help doctors make better decisions on how best to care for each patient.”

Dr Luis Lopes (UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science), senior author of the study, said: “By linking advanced imaging to our cohort of HCM patients (and relatives) with extensive genetic testing, this study detected microstructural abnormalities in vivo in mutation carriers for the first time and was the first to compare these parameters in HCM patients with and without a causal mutation.

“The findings allow us to understand more about the early subclinical manifestations of this serious condition but also provide additional clinical tools for screening, monitoring and hopefully in the near future for therapeutic decision-making.”

Source: University College London

Categories : Lab Tests and Imaging Mental HealthTags :

Plasma Protein Biomarkers Could Detect Early Mental Health Problems in Adolescents

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Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland have identified plasma protein-based biomarkers capable of identifying adolescents at risk of developing mental health issues. Such biomarkers could revolutionise early detection and prevention of mental health problems in young people.The results were published in Nature Mental Health.

Some 10–20% of adolescents struggle with mental health conditions, with the majority going undiagnosed and untreated. This points to a need for new, early indicators of mental health problems to catch these cases and intervene with treatment before the conditions progress.

In the study carried out in the research group of Professor Katja Kanninen, the researchers used self-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) scores to evaluate mental health risk in participants aged between 11 and 16 years. Blood sample analyses showed that 58 proteins were significantly associated with the SDQ score. Bioinformatic analyses were used to identify the biological processes and pathways linked with the identified plasma protein biomarker candidates. Key enriched pathways related to these proteins included immune responses, blood coagulation, neurogenesis, and neuronal degeneration. The study employed a novel symbolic regression algorithm to create predictive models that best separate low and high SDQ score groups.

According to Professor Kanninen, plasma biomarker studies in mental disorders are an emerging field.

“Alterations in plasma proteins have been previously associated with various mental health disorders, such as depression, schizophrenia, psychotic disorders, and bipolar disorders. Our study supports these earlier findings and further revealed that specific plasma protein alterations could indicate a high risk for mental dysfunction in adolescents,” Professor Kanninen notes.

According to the researchers, this pilot study will be followed by more specific investigations of the potential biomarkers for identification of individuals at risk of mental health problems, opening a new avenue for advancements in adolescent mental health care.

Source: University of Eastern Finland

Categories : Lab Tests and Imaging Skeletal SystemTags :

A Quick and Inexpensive Test for Osteoporosis

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In osteoporosis, treatment would be most effective with early detection – something not yet possible with current X-ray based osteoporosis diagnostic tests, which lack the requisite sensitivity. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a biosensor that could someday help identify those most at risk for osteoporosis using less than a drop of blood.

Early intervention is critical to reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with osteoporosis. The most common technique used to measure changes in bone mineral density (BMD) – dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry – is not sensitive enough to detect BMD loss until a significant amount of damage has already occurred. Several genomic studies, however, have reported genetic variations known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are associated with increased risk for osteoporosis. Using this information, Ciara K. O’Sullivan and colleagues wanted to develop a portable electrochemical device that would allow them to quickly detect five of these SNPs in finger-prick blood samples in a step toward early diagnosis.

The device involves an electrode array to which DNA fragments for each SNP are attached. When lysed whole blood is applied to the array, any DNA matching the SNPs binds the sequences and is amplified with recombinase polymerase that incorporates ferrocene, a label that facilitates electrochemical detection. Using this platform, the researchers detected osteoporosis-associated SNPs in 15 human blood samples, confirming their results with other methods.

As the DNA does not have to be purified from the blood, the analysis can be performed quickly (about 15 minutes) and inexpensively (< $0.5 per SNP). Furthermore, because the equipment and reagents are readily accessible and portable, the researchers say that the device offers great potential for use at point-of-care settings, rather than being limited to a centralised laboratory. The technology is also versatile and can be readily adapted to detect other SNPs, as the researchers showed previously when identifying drug resistance in Tuberculosis mycobacterium from sputum and cardiomyopathy risk from blood. Although the device does not diagnose osteoporosis itself, it might help physicians identify people whom they should monitor more closely.

Source: Chemical Society

Categories : Lab Tests and Imaging Obstetrics & GynaecologyTags : 1 Comment

Researchers Discover a Lipid Biomarker that can Identify Preeclampsia Risk

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University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have discovered a lipid biomarker to identify pregnant women at risk of preeclampsia, complications from which are the second-leading cause of maternal death around the world. Their findings are published in the Journal of Lipid Research.

The UVA scientists, led by Charles E. Chalfant, PhD, say that their finding opens the door to simple blood tests to screen patients. Further, the approach worked regardless of whether the women were on aspirin therapy, which is commonly prescribed to women thought to be at risk.

“Clinicians have been seeking simple tests to predict risk of preeclampsia before symptoms appear. Although alterations in some blood lipid levels have been known to occur in preeclampsia, they have not been endorsed as useful biomarkers. Our study presents the first comprehensive analysis of lipid species, yielding a distinctive profile associated with the development of preeclampsia,” said Chalfant. “The lipid ‘signature’ we described could significantly improve the ability to identify patients needing preventative treatment, like aspirin, or more careful monitoring for early signs of disease so that treatment could be initiated in a timely fashion.”

Preeclampsia affects up to 7% of all pregnancies. Symptoms typically appear after 20 weeks and include high blood pressure, kidney problems and abnormalties in blood clotting. The condition is associated with dangerous complications such as kidney and liver dysfunction and seizures, as well as a lifelong increased risk of heart disease for the mothers. An estimated 70 000 women around the world die from preeclampsia and its complications each year.

Doctors commonly recommend low-dose aspirin for at-risk women, but it works for only about half of patients, and it needs to be started within the first 16 weeks of pregnancy – well before symptoms appear. That makes it all the more important to identify women at risk early on, and to better understand preeclampsia in general.

Chalfant and his team wanted to find ‘biomarkers’ in the blood of pregnant women that could reveal their risk of developing preeclampsia. They examined blood plasma samples collected from 57 women in their first 24 weeks of pregnancy, then looked at whether the women went on to develop preeclampsia. The researchers found significant differences in ‘bioactive’ lipids in the blood of women who developed preeclampsia and those who did not.

This, the researchers say, should allow doctors to stratify women’s risk of developing preeclampsia by measuring lipid changes in their blood. The changes represent an important ‘lipid fingerprint’, the scientists say, that could be a useful tool for identifying, preventing and better treating preeclampsia.

“The application of our comprehensive lipid profiling method to routine obstetrical care could significantly reduce maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality,” Chalfant said. “It represents an example of how personalised medicine could address a significant public health challenge.”

Source: University of Virginia Health System

Categories : Lab Tests and Imaging Medical Research & TechnologyTags :

Gravity-powered Biomedical Devices Pull Droplets Through a Maze

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Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed an entirely new approach to building point-of-care diagnostic devices that only use gravity to transport, mix and otherwise manipulate the liquid droplets involved. The demonstration, in the journal Device, requires only commercially available materials and very little power to read results, making it a potentially attractive option for applications in low-resource settings.

“The elegance in this approach is all in its simplicity – you can use whatever tools you happen to have to make it work,” said Hamed Vahabi, a former postdoctoral researcher at Duke. “You could theoretically even just use a handsaw and cut the channels needed for the test into a piece of wood.”

The study was conducted in the laboratory of Ashutosh Chilkoti, the Alan L. Kaganov Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke.

There is no shortage of need for simple, easy-to-use, point-of-care devices. Many demonstrations and commercial devices seek to make diagnoses or measure important biomarkers using only a few drops of liquid with as little power and expertise required as possible. Their goal is to improve health care for the billions of people living in low-resource settings far from traditional hospitals and trained clinicians.

All of these tests have the same basic requirements; they must move, mix and measure small droplets containing biological samples and the active ingredients that make measuring specific biomarkers possible. More expensive examples use tiny electrical pumps to drive these reactions. Others use the physics of liquids within microchannels (microfluidics) that create a sort of suction effect.

This is the first demonstration that only uses gravity. Each approach offers uniquely useful abilities as well as drawbacks.

“Most microfluidic devices need more than just capillary forces to operate,” Chilkoti said. “This approach is much simpler and also allows very complex fluid paths to be deigned and operated, which is not easy or cheap to do with microfluidics.”

The new gravity-driven approach relies on a set of nine commercially available surface coatings that can tweak the wettability and slipperiness at any given point on the device. That is, they can adjust how much droplets flatten down into pancakes or remain spherical while making it easier or harder for them to slide down an incline.

Used together in clever combinations, these surface coatings can create all the microfluidic elements needed in a point-of-care test. For example, if a given location is extremely slippery and a droplet is placed at an intersection where one side pulls liquid flat and the other pushes it into a ball, it will act like a pump and accelerate the droplet toward the former.

“We came up with many different elements to control the motion, interaction, timing and sequence of multiple droplets in the device,” Vahabi said. “All of these phenomena are well-known in the field, but nobody thought of using them to control the motion of droplets in a systematic way before.”

By combining these elements, the researchers created a prototype test to measure the levels of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in a sample of human serum. They carved channels within the test platform to create specific pathways for droplets to travel, each coated with a substance that stops the droplets from sticking along their journey. They also primed specific locations with dried reagents needed for the test, which are soaked up by droplets of simple buffer solution as they travel through.

The whole maze-like test is then capped with a lid containing a couple of holes where the sample and buffer solution are dripped in. Once loaded, the test is placed inside a box-like device with a handle that turns the test 90° to allow gravity to do its work. This device is also equipped with a simple LED and light detector that can quickly and easily detect the amount of blue, red, or green in the test results. This means that the researchers can tag three different biomarkers with different colours for various tests to measure.

In the case of this prototype LDH test, the biomarker is tagged with a blue molecule. A simple microcontroller measures how deep of a blue hue the test results become and how quickly it changes colour, which indicates the amount and concentration of LDH in the sample, to generate results.

“We could eventually also use a smart phone down the line to measure results, but that’s not something we explored in this specific paper,” said Jason Liu, a PhD candidate in the Chilkoti lab.

The demonstration provides a new approach for consideration when engineering inexpensive, low-power, point-of-care diagnostic devices. While the group plans to continue developing their idea, they also hope others will take notice and work on similar tests.

“While a well-designed microfluidic system can be fully automated and easy-to-use by passive means, the timing of discrete steps is usually programmed into the design of the device itself, making modifications to protocol more difficult,” added David Kinnamon, a PhD candidate in the Chilkoti group. “In this work, the user retains more control of the timing of steps while only modestly sacrificing ease-of-operation. Again, this is an advantage for more complex protocols.”

Source: Duke University

Categories : Cancer Lab Tests and ImagingTags :

Gliomas Have Folates Receptors That Could be Targeted for Imaging

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University of Turku researchers have discovered that gliomas contain increased amount of folate receptor expression relative to adjacent brain tissue. This discovery is a new and significant finding in the field, which could allow folate-based radiopharmaceuticals can be used in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to detect folate receptors in gliomas.

This phenomenon, which is described in Frontiers in Immunology, has been observed in both experimental models and human tumour samples.

“Prior to this discovery, the presence of folate receptors and their increased presence in gliomas had not been recognised, and thus they have not yet been used for imaging nor treatment purposes,” summarises Doctoral Researcher Maxwell Miner from the Turku PET Centre at the University of Turku in Finland.

According to research group leader and InFLAMES PI Professor Anne Roivainen this presents an especially exciting target for potential future treatments.

“Our results show an average of 100-fold increase in folate-based radiopharmaceutical accumulation in glioma tissue versus that of adjacent healthy brain tissue,” says Professor Roivainen.

Urgent need for new chemotherapy treatments

Glioma brain tumours originate from the non-neuronal glial cells in the brain, which outnumber neurons in quantity. Gliomas comprise numerous subgroups, with even a high degree of morphological and receptor variability within a single cancerous lesion.

This exceptional cellular heterogeneity can make treatment difficult. There is an urgent need for new chemotherapy treatments particularly for the most malignant brain cancers as they often grow in an infiltrative web-like manner on their periphery making distinguishing the boundaries between glioma and non-glioma difficult. The researchers at the Turku PET Centre hope that this recent discovery will lead to further investigation into folate-targeted brain tumour detection and treatment.

Source: University of Turku

Categories : Cancer Lab Tests and ImagingTags :

US Task Force to Recommend Earlier Start to Breast Cancer Screening

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In a move bringing it closer in line with other organisations’ breast cancer screening guidelines, The United States Preventative Task Force (USPSTF) has released a draft statement recommending mammography every other year (biennially) from ages 40 to 74.

These recommendations are not applicable to women with a genetic marker or syndrome linked to increased breast cancer risk, a history of high-dose chest radiotherapy at a young age, or previous breast cancer or a high-risk breast lesion on previous biopsies.

According to the USPSTF, “new and more inclusive science about breast cancer in people younger than 50 has enabled us to expand our prior recommendation and encourage all women to get screened in their 40s. We have long known that screening for breast cancer saves lives, and the science now supports all women getting screened, every other year, starting at age 40.”

South African cancer screening guidelines typically closely follow American ones, according to an article by Lipschitz in the South African Journal of Radiology. Many countries had not recommended screening at the ages of 40–50 due to fears of overdiagnosis.

The UPSTF made particular attention the fact that black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer than white women, and have a high rate of aggressive cancers at young ages.

The recommendations are not without criticism. Biennial screenings are not seen as worth it by Desountis et al., as it leaving two years between tests leaves too much time for a tumour to grow.

Debra Monticciolo, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a member of the Society of Breast Imaging’s board of directors, told MedPage Today that she was “disappointed” with the decision to recommend biennial scans.

“Even if you look at their own data,” Monticciolo said, “annual screening results in more deaths averted, no matter what type of screening program you put in those models.”

The UPSTF has posted the new recommendations on its website for comment.

Regarding the ongoing debated about continued screening in women ages 75 and older, and supplemental screening for those with dense breasts, the UPSTF found there was not enough evidence for a recommendation.