It has been well established that women with dense breasts have a much higher chance to have cancers missed using traditional mammography, leading to discovery at a much later stage.
The mission of Breast Density Inform has been to pass legislation—first at the state level—that would require health care professionals to alert women with dense breasts of their cancer risk. Currently women in Texas and Connecticut must be informed of their breast density. Women in the other 48 states aren’t so lucky. This is why Breast Density Inform is taking its crusade to the national stage.
Federal legislation (HR 3102 also known as The Breast Density and Mammography Reporting Act of 2011) would make the reporting already available to women in Connecticut and Texas the law of the land.
In addition, Are You Dense Advocacy of which Breast Density Inform is a part helped drive the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s inclusion of the topic of a regulatory solution to standardize breast density notification at the recent National Mammography Quality Assurance Advisory Committee (NMQAAC) Meeting. The consensus of the NMQAAC was that all mammography reports and lay summaries should include a women’s breast density.
While the federal legislation continues to move forward, at the state level, nine legislatures have or will introduce mammography reporting bills during the 2011 session and 10 more will do so during the 2012 session.
(Source: Press Release)
