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Are 3D mammograms better than standard 2D imaging for catching advanced cancers? A clinical trial is recruiting thousands of volunteers — including a large number of Black women who face disparities in breast cancer death rates — to try to find out. People like Carole Stovall, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., have signed up for the study to help answer the question. (Johnson, 10/17)

Can a machine catch a breast cancer tumor better than a human? Radiologists at Lynn Women’s Health & Wellness Institute at Boca Regional Hospital have been working to find that answer. They began adding artificial intelligence technology to existing 3D mammography for breast cancer screening in 2020. With three years of results, they discovered AI can make a significant difference in finding cancer. Both the radiologists at the Institute (part of Baptist Health South Florida) and the machines read thousands of mammogram results each year. In some instances, AI helped catch cancers before they could be detected by the human eye. Since implementing AI, their detection rate has improved 23%. (Krischer Goodman, 10/17)

Oncologists, like Dr. Denise Sanderson of HCA Florida St. Lucie Hospital, said Somers' approach to treatment was non-traditional, but that doesn't diminish what she did to make breast cancer something people aren’t afraid to talk about. "She may have had the same outcome either way, so it was the right outcome for her," Sanderson said. "I think independent of what you might read sometimes about doctors talking about her choices, she really helped women to be able to talk about breast cancer." (Gilmore, 10/17)

This month you’ve probably seen plenty of companies selling pink merch and items with the breast cancer ribbon, since it’s breast cancer awareness month. Many consumers are now asking if companies moving this pink merchandise are actually putting any of that money they’re making toward research, prevention, or supporting those impacted by the disease? ”Anybody can put something in the color pink and people can actually have a pink ribbon on their product and nobody regulates that,” said Better Business Bureau of Southern Colorado CEO Jonathan Liebert. (Nelson, 10/17)

Roughly 35 percent of women of reproductive age in the United States don’t have sufficient amounts of iron in their bodies. And yet the nutritional deficiency, which can affect multiple functions, from immunity to cognition, often goes undiagnosed, said Dr. Malcolm Munro, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. This oversight is partly because symptoms can be difficult to pin down but also because iron deficiency is rarely recognized as an urgent condition with short- and long-term consequences, he said. (Gupta, 10/17)

Molly Giles was standing in her kitchen one spring night in 2019, musing about whether to do the dishes or leave them until the morning, when a bone in her left leg snapped and she crashed to the ground, breaking her hip. “I passed out, and I’m pretty sure I would have died if my partner hadn’t been there and called 911,” the Northern California novelist recalls. Giles, now 81, had “bones like meringue,” her doctor rather glibly later told her. A scan several years earlier had revealed osteopenia, a precursor to the “silent” disease of bone density loss known as osteoporosis. But neither Giles nor her doctors followed up, and her bones grew increasingly weak until her femur “melted,” as she later described it. (Ellison, 10/17)

People often say “time is money,” but talk to any neurologist and they’ll tell you time is brain. Because when it comes to strokes, every minute counts. “The brain is very sensitive to injury,” said Dr. Eliza Miller, a neurologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. The human brain houses 86 billion neurons. For every minute that passes, a person having a stroke loses 1.9 million of them, according to research from the American Heart Association. (Solis-Moreira, 10/17)

The morning of Jan. 10 started as a typical Minnesota winter morning for Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley. “I was digging out my driveway,” Conley recalled. Earlier this month, from her office inside the Hennepin County Government Center, Conley recounted how her life changed on that day. It started with an unfamiliar pain between Conley’s shoulder blades. (Moini, 10/18)