Carrying a tune is a talent that runs in Marcia Maring's family.

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"My whole family majored in music," Maring told Ivanhoe. "I played in college, and I still play piano today."

Unfortunately, that isn't the only trait passed down through the generations.

"My aunt was 40 years old when she had breast cancer," Maring said. "Then my mother developed breast cancer."

A few years ago, a mammogram found Maring also had breast cancer. Like 25 percent of women, she has dense breast tissue, which makes it hard to detect tumors.

"In fact, in those women, mammography can miss one out of every two cancers, so when a woman comes for a mammogram and she's told it's normal, that doesn't necessarily mean there is no tumor," Deborah Rhodes, M.D., an internal medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told Ivanhoe.

A team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic developed a new form of tumor detection called molecular breast imaging, or MBI.  Women get an injection of a radioactive tracer that travels to the tumor cells and lights them up.

"Its like seeing a lighthouse," Michael O'Connor, a nuclear medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., explained. "You see this beacon in the breast, and it's very easy to pick up the tumor."

In a study involving more than 900 women, MBI picked up three times as many cancerous tumors as a mammogram.

"We've shown we can detect even very small cancers -- those that are under 10 millimeters," Carrie Hruska, Ph.D., a nuclear medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic, told Ivanhoe.

"In about 10 percent of the cases, we would also find additional small tumors that the mammogram was missing," Dr. Rhodes said.

That's exactly what happened to Maring. The MBI found a second tumor the mammogram missed. It changed her course of treatment.

"I was like, 'Wow!'" Maring said. "I didn't realize that the mammogram had only picked up the central tumor."

After surgery and chemo, Maring is a healthy mom getting ready to send her kids off to college.

"It's gonna be a new chapter in our lives," she said.

Studies show MBI is just as accurate as MRIs but much less expensive.  Doctors say the new procedure is also more comfortable than a mammogram because it uses less pressure. Researchers hope to make it available to the public within the next few years.

More Information

If this story or any other Ivanhoe story has impacted your life or prompted you or someone you know to seek or change treatments, please let us know by contacting Melissa Medalie at mmedalie@ivanhoe.com

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Lori Johnson
johnson.lori@mayo.edu

Beth Connelly
connelly.beth@mayo.edu

http://www.mayoclinic.org/