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Breast cancer checks could be used to help women avoid heart attacks by spotting those most at risk, a study has found.
Researchers discovered that routine breast scans can spot women in danger of heart disease, who could then be offered lifestyle advice and drugs to lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
“Mammography has potential as a two-for-one risk assessment tool,” said scientists led by Dr Jennifer Barraclough, a cardiologist at The George Institute for Global Healthy in Sydney.
Around 2 million women receive breast screenings in the UK each year, with women aged from 50 to 71 invited for checks by the NHS every three years.
Breast density a key sign
Breast X-rays to screen for cancer can shed light on heart health because if someone has plaques in their heart arteries, there may also be plaques in blood vessels elsewhere – including in the breasts, researchers found.
Another sign of heart disease is if women have more fatty tissue inside their breasts, because this is linked with more fat around the heart. Fat density in the breasts also shows up on mammograms.
To investigate if breast screening could be practically turned into a heart health check, Dr Barraclough’s team analysed health records from nearly 50,000 Australians who had had at least one breast scan.
After 9 years of follow-up, 3,400 of them had had a heart attack, stroke or been diagnosed with plaques in their arteries.
The doctors used these results to develop an AI tool that calculated their risk of one of these events, based on their breast scan results plus age.
Heart attacks can strike out of the blue (Photo: Yuichiro Chino/Getty) The AI program was as accurate for predicting heart disease as current heart risk screening tools, where a simple equation combines risk factors like weight, blood pressure, family history and so on.
This suggests that breast screening could be used to help women reduce their heart disease risk, said Dr Barraclough.
The research was published in the medical journal, Heart.
The approach “would be a simple measure that does not require additional history or blood tests and could [be] integrated into a routine breast screening visit,” said Professor Gemma Figtree, a cardiologist at the University of Sydney, in an accompanying comment piece in the journal.
Other unusual methods of heart risk screening are under investigation, including checking for plaques in blood vessels in the eye or the neck, said Dr Arunashis Sau, a cardiologist at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the study.
“As you develop furring of the arteries, that will affect a lot of the arteries in the body, including the arteries of the heart,” he said. “The fact that you can detect it from mammography is not that surprising.”
“The benefit of approach like this is that you can just do it in the background, so people that are already coming may have an added benefit, to identify people that are really high risk.
“This [could be] a wake up call, to try and change your lifestyle: do more exercise, improve your diet, reduce your salt intake, lose weight. Then the step above that is medication.”
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