Smart Woman: Breast Cancer Screenings
By: Maxine Ridling
Updated: June 5, 2012
Jeanne Miller was just a teenager when she was diagnosed with cancer.
"I just heard this "Hodgkins thing" and I really didn't know what that meant as a 16 year old.," Miller says.
It meant Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. Miller was successfully treated with chemotherapy and radiation.
For the next twenty years she was carefully monitored for health problems that can develop from cancer treatment.
"I knew there was a reason i was going back every year. I knew that they had saved me once and that, you know i may need them again," she says.
She did.
The study of more than 1200 women who received chest radiation for childhood cancers found 24 percent developed breast cancer by age 50. For Hodgkins Lymphoma survivors like Miller it was 30 percent - that's more than fifteen times the normal rate.
Chaya Moskowitz of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York helped run the study. "We're talking about 50,000 women alive today who have been given high doses of radiation and based on the risk that we find in our study these women should be getting screened," Moskowitz says.
But fewer than half get the recommended yearly mammogram and breast MRI starting at age 25.
Jeanne Miller had a double mastectomy last fall and appears to be cancer free.
