IN2018, 47-year-old Adriana Ermter found a lump in her armpit. Her doctor referred her for a mammogram, but the clinic said it was likely just a calcium deposit. After months of requests for additional screening, the Toronto resident received a second mammogram and an MRI. This time, the clinic found cancer. “If I hadn’t advocated for myself, under the guidelines I wouldn’t have had regular mammograms until I was 50,” Ermter says. “Who knows what stage of breast cancer I would have progressed to?”

You may call your boobs your breasties, but are they really? Are you feeling up your best friends and your armpits on the first of every month the same way you’d check a cantaloupe or melon for its ripeness at the grocery store? You know, to make sure you don’t have a lump, swelling, redness, soreness, thickening, irritation or dimpling of the skin, or redness, flaky skin, pulling or pain in the nipple area that could potentially be breast cancer. Better yet, do you know how to properly screen for breast cancer? You should, you need to. It’s your right.

Best Health Magazine Dr. Paula Gordon speaks to Rebecca Gow Along with routine screenings, frequent at-home examinations are the key to knowing your norm and catching any concerning changes.

New Brunswick is the latest province to mandate that women be told their breast density following a mammogram, but experts say the welcome move falls short of a broader breast cancer strategy they’d like to see extended coast-to-coast.

An organization deplores that the Quebec government does not directly disclose to women important information for their health: do they have dense breasts or not? Deprived of this information, Quebec women cannot take measures to detect breast cancer in time, he believes.

Breast cancer survivors are putting pressure on the Quebec government to ensure that women are directly informed of their breast density in their mammography report and of the risks associated with dense breasts.

What if you had a mammogram and the results did not show your cancer? That’s what happened to Annie Slight, a woman who was diagnosed at age 42 with a late diagnosis of stage 2, grade 3 breast cancer that was not detected during her routine mammogram. She told me her story and now wants to educate women about this little known factor that made all the difference for her: breast density.

It’s a frightening statistic that far too many women in Nova Scotia are aware of: One in eight will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. But now the Nova Scotia health care system is aiming to give women new and potentially life-saving information on their breast health with every mammogram report. Women in the province will now be able to learn whether they have dense breasts with the results of their mammogram as part of the Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program.

Nova Scotia has become the first province to provide breast density results to all women who undergo a mammogram, using a new technology pioneered in-house. The standardized changes are effective immediately, with the new Densitas breast density assessment software already installed in screening centres across Nova Scotia.