Presenter Dr. Wendie Berg, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, will share findings from a study that explored how women with a personal history of breast cancer and who had BI-RADS 3 lesions should be followed, using data from the National Mammography Database (NMD) to assess the cancer yield of these lesions. The study included nearly 68,000 women with BI-RADS 3 findings identified between 2009 and 2018 from 471 NMD facilities; Berg's group tracked the positive predictive value of biopsies (PPV3) and the number of breast cancers per number of women (cancer yield).
Of all the women included in the study, 3.1% had a personal history of breast cancer. For these women, the overall biopsy rate of BI-RADS 3 lesions was 26.1%, yielding 339 cancers; the PPV3 of these biopsies was 62.2%. Overall cancer yield among women with a personal history of breast cancer was 16.2% -- far beyond the rate of 1.34% among women who do not have a history of the disease, Berg's group noted.
"Imaging findings that would otherwise be considered BI-RADS 3 in average-risk women should generally prompt biopsy in woman with personal history of breast cancer," Berg and colleagues concluded.
