MRI surveillance for women with dense breasts and a previous breast cancer and/or high risk lesion

The role of surveillance breast MRI for women with mammographically dense breasts, a personal history of breast cancer (BC), atypical hyperplasia (AH), or lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS) is unclear. We estimated the performance of annual surveillance MRI in women with a combination of these risk factors.

We performed a retrospective review of the clinical, radiological, and pathological parameters of women who received annual concurrent surveillance breast MRI and mammography between 04/2013 and 12/2015 and fulfilled all of the following criteria: 1) age <70; 2) prior diagnosis of AH, LCIS or BC; 3) heterogeneously or extremely dense breast(s); and 4) did not qualify for our provincial breast MRI high risk screening program.

This study included 198 patients (266 MRI exams). MRI detected 15 cancers: 11 invasive stage I and 4 in-situ. All but 1 were mammographically occult and there were no interval cancers. The cancer detection rate (CDR) and false positive (FP) rate were 6.1% and 21% for round one and 4.7% and 12.5% for round two, respectively. Not being on anti-estrogen therapy and having a 1st degree relative with BC significantly increased the likelihood of tumor detection.

The CDR and FP rate of surveillance MRI in this study were comparable to those reported for women with BRCA mutations. The addition of annual MRI to mammography should be considered for surveillance of women with a combination of these risk factors, particularly if they have a family history of BC and are not on anti-estrogen therapy.