Doctors have discovered a way to use routine mammograms that screen for breast cancer to spot heart disease, the world’s leading – and frequently underdiagnosed – cause of death in women. Researchers analysed the scans using artificial intelligence and were able to successfully identify women with coronary heart disease, high blood pressure or who had suffered a stroke. Experts said it meant breast screening for cancer could become dual-purpose, helping to flag women with heart disease, and other cardiovascular issues, as well as spotting breast cancer early.
Millions of women are living with undetected heart disease. For decades, it has often been misdiagnosed or not picked up until the late stages of the disease. Details of the breakthrough were presented in Munich at the European Society of Cardiology’s annual congress, the world’s largest heart conference.
The implications are significant because hundreds of millions of women undergo mammograms every year. Doctors in Israel examined 97,364 scans from 29,921 women who had an average age of 54. By cross-referencing medical records, they found 16% of the women had high blood pressure, 2.5% had coronary heart disease, and 2.5% had experienced a stroke.
A machine-learning model was trained to identify women with these conditions and was able to reliably identify women who had suffered a stroke, based upon their mammogram alone, 86% of the time. For high blood pressure and coronary heart disease, it was 79% and 78% reliable at distinguishing between the women with the condition and those without. The results were also consistent regardless of age, or whether or not a woman also had cancer.
Dr Viana Copeland from Tel Aviv University, Israel, presented the findings to delegates in Munich. On the other hand, many women do attend routine breast cancer screening, even when they haven’t sought care for cardiovascular symptoms.” Because mammography is already widely used, analysing breast scans for information about a woman’s heart health “could potentially offer a scalable approach without requiring an additional imaging examination,” Copeland added. Elena Arbelo, an expert member of the European Society of Cardiology communication committee, said the findings were “compelling”.
That matters because CVD in women is still too often recognised late.” She added: “The challenge now is to establish accuracy and reliability – to move from experimentation to clinical implementation.” Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, a consultant cardiologist and clinical director of the British Heart Foundation, a charity, also welcomed the breakthrough. She said: “Heart disease is the world’s biggest killer of not only men, but also women. Despite this, the myth persists that it’s only a ‘man’s disease’, meaning that when it comes to the heart, women are disproportionally unaware, unheard, underdiagnosed, undertreated and typically underrepresented in clinical research.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
