Breast imaging

More than 20,000 women, equivalent to the population of a city like Grevena in northern Greece or big Cycladic islands including Naxos and Syros, have been diagnosed with breast cancer at an early stage, with greater prospects of curing the disease, thanks to the national Fofi Gennimata initiative.

The breast cancer screening program began in June 2022 for women aged 50 to 69.

Dr. Gergana Nikolova from the Bulgarian Medical Association (BMA) commented on BNT that the importance of the changes and the significance of preventive check-ups lie not only in prevention but also in the opportunity to increase access to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for the detection of more serious diseases in early stages.

Greece has the highest availability of mammography units in the European Union, new data from Eurostat has shown.

In 2021, Greece had 7.1 and Cyprus 5.9 machines per 100,000 female inhabitants aged 50-69 years.

The rate of mammography units, which are designed exclusively for taking mammograms, was also high in Belgium (3.6), Italy (3.4) and Croatia (3.3).

The Ministry of Health is extending the age limits of the Fofi Gennimata Program for breast cancer screening. As part of new European guidelines, the program will be extended to women aged 45 to 74, compared to the current age group of 50 to 69.

A new ultrasound device that can identify breast cancer at the earliest stages of the disease has been developed by a Turkish scientist and her colleagues in the U.S.

Canan Dağdeviren, a Turkish scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has designed a bra-mounted ultrasound scanner that can detect breast cancer in the early stages.

In 2017, the proportion of women aged 50-69 years who had been screened for breast cancer (using a mammography) within the previous two years differed greatly among Member States.