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Neighbor News

3-D Mammograms May Save Your Life - My Mammogram at Montclair Radiology

Mammograms have gone high tech - and if you're like me - you will want to get the BEST mammogram ever created - 3-D Mammogram

I am a stickler for getting my mammogram every year. Did you know that about 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime? In 2017, an estimated 252,710 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S., along with 63,410 new cases of non-invasive (in situ) breast cancer.

My friend in Montclair and I always go to Montclair Radiology. She goes to their Montclair office and I go to West Caldwell.(They have offices in Nutley and now Jersey City too.) Every year, we make our appointments in May and we always always go to Star Pizza that night to celebrate the fact that we are doing all we can to stay strong and healthy.

This year, we both decided to do the 3-D Mammogram. Another local paper wrote about it, and we both decided to check it out. My husband tells me I can be dense - and he’s right! (Don’t tell him.) My breasts are dense, which means they have less fatty tissue and more non-fatty tissue compared to breasts that aren't dense. All mammograms are great - don’t get me wrong - but for me, the 3-D is better, since it can detect 40 percent more invasive cancers than traditional mammography.

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I took this photo with my article from the Facebook page of Montclair Radiology - since it has all the stats. So: my fear was it would hurt more (it did not hurt at all); take longer (nope - it was fast) and cost a lot of money. My insurance company covered all of it except for $75, which to me is a bargain - because that $75 might save my life. (Shhh - and my shoes cost a lot more than that!)

The way 3-D works is the images are so incredible the radiologists see everything up close in a very high tech way and see even the tiniest of images, which means if you have breast cancer this test will show it. During the 3D part of the exam, an x-ray arm sweeps over the breast, taking multiple images in seconds. And, 3-D mammography means you have less chance of getting a scary false positive, which means the world to me. I don’t like stress.

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So: we both had our 3-D mammograms. We both read up on it and with Cancer.org reports Research has shown that dense breasts:

-- can be 6 times more likely to develop cancer

--can make it harder for mammograms to detect breast cancer; breast cancers (which --look white like breast gland tissue) are easier to see on a mammogram when they're surrounded by fatty tissue (which looks dark).

--About 43% of women ages 40 to 74 years old in the United States are classified as having dense breasts.

Our pizza and beer was delicious (thanks, Star Pizza) as always and best of all, I picked up a surprise for us to wear: 3-D glasses. The way I see it, you can’t go wrong in Jersey wearing dark glasses! Oh - and we both had good results again this year.

Please schedule your mammogram and remember: all mammograms are life savers.

If you want to visit my this radiology center, the website is www.montclairradiology.com.

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