State Sen. John Flanagan, R-Long Island, admitted that it was a little while before he found a comfort level with some of the terminology, but it didn’t take him long to see the significance of the issue: As many as 50 percent of tumors in women with dense breast tissue go undetected by conventional mammograms, and most women with dense tissue don’t even know it — even if their doctors do.
Townsend Montant of Shelter Island held up a tennis ball mounted on a trophy, and said that his wife’s tumor had grown to that size before her cancer was detected. She died in October. On a regular mammogram, he said, the tumor would have looked like “a golf ball in a snowstorm.”
Flanagan and Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, D-Rockland County [corrected], were joined by several other lawmakers to discuss a bill that would require insurance companies to cover supplemental screenings, such as MRI or ultrasound, for women with dense breast tissue. The legislation would also require that mammography reports include clear language informing women with the physiological condition about the medical facts surrounding it — including the potential need for additional tests.
There’s no “type” of breast that’s more likely to have dense tissue, Flanagan said. Dr. Thomas Kolb said that younger women tend to have a higher incidence of dense tissue: 66 percent of pre-menopausal women have the condition; 25 percent of post-menopausal women have it. Cancer is four to six times more likely in women with dense tissue.
“My name is JoAnn Pushkin, and I am a time bomb,” said one of several breast cancer survivors or relatives who told their stories. Pushkin, of Dix Hills, discovered a lump in her breast through a self-exam, only to later learn that her tumor had been growing for five years, camouflaged from mammography.
Her radiologist and her referring doctor knew that she had dense tissue. “The only one who didn’t know was the one with dense breasts,” said Pushkin, the executive director of Are You Dense Advocacy.
Kolb noted that while MRI is currently set aside for women in the highest-risk category — such as those with a family history of breast cancer or other genetic markers for the disease — it’s not readily offered due to the cost, which is roughly 10 times that of mammography, and the relative complexity of the procedure. But ultrasound, he noted, comes with roughly the same cost as mammography.
Assemblyman Jack McEneny spoke about his late wife, Barbara, an X-ray technician for almost four decades. He said it was “a national disgrace” that the gap between advancing technology and lagging education was costing women’s lives.