Breast cancer will affect one in eight American women during their lifetime and 39,510 women will die from the disease this year alone, according to data released by the National Cancer Institute. These statistics have created a race to develop an effective screening method for breast cancer.
First Warning Systems, Inc., a company based in Reno, Nev., has entered the fray by developing a sports bra that could possibly detect cancer if worn for half a day. However, the screening system used is based on technology that has not been incredibly effective in detecting breast cancer in the past .
The device, currently only a prototype, uses sensors to detect temperature changes in tissue which may happen when new blood vessels related to cancer cells are growing. This screening process is noninvasive and could provide earlier and more accurate test results than the mammogram X-rays that are currently being used.
Mammograms are currently the best way to screen for breast cancer, however, the technology has some significant problems.
Mammograms can “over-diagnose” breast cancer by finding precancerous cell abnormalities that may never turn into cancer or that do so slowly that the patient would never be affected by them. This can lead to expensive and unnecessary cancer treatments.
Mammograms aren’t perfect, but the technology used in the sports bra isn’t necessarily better. It is based on thermography devices that have generally been shown as inaccurate in detecting breast cancer.
However, First Warning Systems maintains that their process has important differences from thermography: instead of creating a temperature map, the system analyzes differences in temperature over the course of a day.
It tracks the woman’s typical circadian rhythm, the temperature pattern that the human body follows throughout one day, and then finds abnormalities in that rhythm that could signify the presence of cancer. The device can then provide physicians with the probability that the patient has cancer.
Interestingly, the sports bra is able to remember the temperature patterns of typical cancer cases and apply them to the woman being tested, and can also take into account factors such as age, family history, and age at the birth of the first child.
A great selling point for this method is the ease of wearing the bra for 12 hours at home or at work in comparison with a mammogram screening at a doctor’s office. The technology also promises to be more effective than mammograms in that it can screen dense breast tissue, which is most commonly found in women under age 40. First Warning Systems additionally claims that the device can detect breast cancer three or four years after the first gene mutation, while mammograms generally require at least 10 years.
The company has yet to release its full clinical trial data. From what has been provided, the device is beating mammograms by displaying 90 percent accuracy in detecting breast cancer in three separate trials containing 650 women total.
The percentage of false readings is less than 10 percent, and the device might even be able to monitor a woman’s health during chemotherapy and radiation treatments. First Warning Systems has stated that it will make all of its data available after completing a fourth and final clinical trial in 2013.
The company then plans to get European Union and FDA approval to market the product, and hopes to launch the device in America sometime in 2014.
Although it’s impossible to get too excited while the clinical trial data hasn’t been verified, the device could change the standard of breast cancer screenings if it lives up to the promises of its creators. It could also spark the development of an array of wearable medical devices integrated into clothing.
The problem is that devices like these never seem to hold up to the promise their clinical trials show. For now, women will have to stick to the current most effective screening method, mammograms, as recommended by the American Cancer Society and several other organizations.
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