Irish health blog educates on link between breast density and cancer

Lifestyle blogs are ten a penny, but well-informed health blogs are hard to find. Siobhan Freeney’s Being Dense is an Irish blog aiming to raise awareness around breast density, a condition that increases the risk of developing cancer.

“Breast density is like mammogram’s dirty little secret,” she writes. “Half of women over 40 have no idea that their ‘normal’ mammogram might not be normal at all. You see, cancer [shows up as] white, and dense tissue [also shows up as] white. So, dense breast tissue can overlap with cancers, masking them from view; in fact, we miss up to 50 per cent of cancers in dense breasts.”

Freeney’s blog is informative and well-written, promoting awareness of breast density as well as the relevance of supplemental breast screening. This awareness is important because you won’t know if you have it and it has nothing to do with breast size or shape. A mammogram is the only way to determine this and currently, the National Breast Cancer Screening Program does not routinely inform women of their breast density.

Follow Freeney's blog for more updates or head to the free seminar on June 10th at the RCSI co-organised by Being Dense and the Irish Cancer Society's Breast-Predict research centre where Dr Maeve Mullooly of RCSI and Dr Paula Gordon from the University of British Columbia will speak more on this topic.