Breast MRI scans might wrong

Lumps detected in women at a high risk of breast cancer using hi-tech MRI scans overwhelmingly turn out to be false alarms, a Dutch study suggests.

But while researchers found five out of six scans which suggested a problem were wrong, they were nonetheless very effective at spotting invasive cancers. And while false-positives caused anxiety, the study did not find women were rashly opting for mastectomies.

The findings were published in the Annals of Oncology. Women with certain genes have as much as an 85% risk of breast cancer.

In the UK, NHS guidelines say that a woman with a family history of the disease may be offered yearly MRI scans if her doctors think it is appropriate, in addition to the recommended mammogram.

MRI scans - which use magnetic resonance imaging - are more sensitive than standard mammograms, and as such are seen as particularly effective in picking up early breast cancers in younger women with denser breast tissue.