MRI's high false positive rate has little impact on women's choice of preventive mastectomy

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) falsely detects breast cancer in five out of every six positive scans according to new research into the use of MRI for women with a high, inherited risk of developing the disease. However, this high rate of false positives does not have a major impact on a woman’s decision whether or not to have a prophylactic mastectomy.

The study, published today (Wednesday 26 March) in the April issue of the cancer journal, Annals of Oncology [1], also showed that MRI was very good at detecting genuine cases of invasive cancers and ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a localised pre-cancer that can develop into invasive breast cancer, although the authors said that improvements in detection were still necessary.

source article: Eurekalert