“I had never seen a letter like that before and had no idea what having dense breasts even meant,” said Mullen, 38, of Andover, Massachusetts. Dense tissue makes it harder to find breast cancer on a mammogram; and that dense breast tissue is a risk factor for cancer. You've got dense breasts. “You cannot counsel an entire population of women with dense breasts with one policy that’s going to be appropriate for everybody,” Pearlman said. Although it’s true that women with dense breasts are 1.5 to 2 times more likely than other women to develop breast cancer, they’re no more likely to die from it.

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Persons: Shamma Mullen, “, ”, Mullen, Judith Garber, Mark Pearlman, ” Pearlman, Robert Smith, Smith, it’s, ” Smith, Dr, Hilary Marston, ” Marston, that’s, Nancy Keating, Keating, Garber, Ruth Etzioni, —, Crissy Matos, Matos, Marston, Pearlman, ” Mullen Organizations: Food and Drug Administration, FDA, Lown Institute, University of Michigan Medical School, American College of Obstetricians, National Comprehensive Cancer Network, American Cancer Society, American College of Radiology, Comprehensive Cancer Network, U.S . Preventive Services, Force, Harvard Medical School, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Internal Medicine Locations: Andover , Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Stroudsburg , Pennsylvania