In an ABC Kansas 49 News television report, mammograms could help diagnose both breast cancer and heart disease. Bunnie Gleiman went in for her yearly mammogram and her doctors found calcifications in the arteries of her breast. Finding calcifications in the breast is not all that uncommon, but it is a red flag warning to women regarding the possibility of breast cancer. According to radiologist Dr. Barbara Jaeger, "Those calcifications are what people call hardening of the arteries. They're actually calcifications that form on the arteries and those can be a sign of heart disease."
When Gleiman's mammogram revealed calcifications in the breast, she said it saved her life -- not from breast cancer -- but from heart disease. After the mammogram, she had a talk with her doctor who put her on cholesterol medicine and blood pressure medicine. Gleiman reports she is very healthy now.
"Many of us thought that it had a relationship to heart disease, but it hadn't actually been studied," Dr. Jaeger said. "More recently, there have been several large studies and many, many smaller ones that have shown that there is a correlation between these vascular calcifications on arteries in the breast, because of the similar size to the arteries of the heart." To watch the news video of this featured story, go here.
