 For Immediate Release
Mercy Breast MRI Study One of the Largest
Oklahoma City—In a new study, published in
September’s American Journal of Surgery, Alan Hollingsworth, M.D., and
physicians from Mercy Women’s Center share results from a recent study
they completed concerning pre-operative breast MRIs. This study,
co-sponsored by Breast MRI of Oklahoma, includes 603 patients and is the
largest series of pre-operative patients ever reported from a single
institution.
“The only study larger than ours is the American
College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) trial that included 969
patients from 25 sites, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine
in 2007,” said Dr. Hollingsworth, study coordinator and lead author.
“And while our results were very similar to the ACRIN study, we also
found that much of the speculative criticism about pre-op breast MRI
today appears to be without merit. Women in our study who underwent
breast MRIs had a better chance of avoiding mastectomies. They also knew
pre-operatively, thanks to the MRI, whether or not they had cancer
elsewhere in either breast.”
Since 2003, when breast MRI was introduced at Mercy,
more patients have opted for breast conservation procedures.
Surprisingly, this trend was even stronger when patients underwent
additional biopsies before surgery because of MRI results.
“We think we’re seeing this because we can
demonstrate to women who have solitary tumors that breast conservation
is safe,” said Rebecca Stough, M.D., radiologic director of Mercy
Women’s Center. “Not only are they good candidates for lumpectomy, but
they can often have partial breast irradiation, which reduces treatment
time to one week, with few side effects.”
The study also showed 7.7 percent of patients had
other areas of cancer in the same breast while 3.7 percent had cancers
in the other breast that were unsuspected. “Although these may seem like
small percentages, we feel that it justifies routine use of pre-op
breast MRI,” said Dr. Hollingsworth. “Small percentages translate into
large numbers in a common disease like breast cancer. And mammography
only detected 19 percent of opposite-side cancers in our study.”
Most remarkable was the finding that with a breast
MRI pre-operatively, only 8.8 percent of women had to undergo further
surgery due to positive margins after lumpectomy. “This number contrasts
sharply with the 30 to 60 percent re-excision rates among the critics of
pre-op breast MRI use,” said Dr. Hollingsworth. “If you’re operating
twice on so many lumpectomy patients, it makes the cost-effectiveness of
mapping the tumor pre-operatively with MRI an easy winner, and more
importantly, reduces the patient’s stress and anxiety caused by
re-operations.”
Dr. Hollingsworth was assisted in his efforts by Dr.
Stough, Carol O’Dell, M.D., and Charles Brekke, M.D., breast
radiologists at Mercy.
Press release dated: September 3, 2008
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