Screening for breast cancer is stressed

If there's a suspected burglar in his backyard, Dr. Brett Parkinson is not going to simply hope the stranger goes away or wait until he breaks inside the house. As a home?owner he's going to call the police right away.

But most women don't react to the threat of breast cancer in the same way, Parkinson said. "There are those who put off screening, or who have a mammogram and don't go in again for four years. They play all kinds of psychological games, with this basic premise: 'If we don't know it's there, it's not there.'

"That's crazy," said Parkinson, medical director of the Breast Care Center at Intermountain Medical Center. "Why would you not want to find out early enough to do something about it?"

Parkinson will address the myths and truths about breast cancer this Saturday for callers in the monthly Deseret News/Intermountain Healthcare Hotline. From 10 a.m. to noon, he and Dr. Teresa Reading, a general surgeon at LDS Hospital, will answer questions. Call 801-236-6061 or 1-800-925-8177.

As a radiologist, Parkinson interprets the images of suspected cancer and is usually the one to make the diagnosis. Because the rate of breast cancer is only about five per 1,000, he sees a lot of relieved women leave the Breast Care Center each day.

"But I do see the women who are diagnosed almost every day, too. At IMC, we diagnose about 400 women per year. That's more than one per day, and that's too many."

While he and his staff work hard to help those women deal with the emotional fallout of the diagnosis, they are able offer "quite a bit of hope," he said. "If we catch it at stage 0 or stage 1, the prognosis is excellent.

"We stress that they did the right thing to come in, and we'll do our best to treat the disease."

If the cancer is detected before cells have left the milk duct, "the cure rate is about 99 percent." Anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of breast cancers are caught at that stage, and many more are identified before the cancer moves into the lymph nodes.

When that's the case, most will survive. While the odds of survival improve dramatically when caught early, about 44,000 women will die of breast cancer this year, he said.

"Many are having it diagnosed at a later stage. They only come in when they feel a lump. They haven't had a screening mammogram. Once they've felt a lump it doesn't mean they can't be cured, but the chances are less."