Most women know to check for lumps in their breasts, but few women know there's a type of breast cancer that doesn't always form a lump and can be hard to detect on mammograms. Between two and three thousand Australian women are diagnosed with lobular breast cancer each year, with advocates pushing for better treatments and greater awareness.
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00:00 10 to 15 percent of breast cancer diagnoses are lobular breast cancer, but it's a little
00:08 bit different from the one that we all know about that forms a lump and that we are told
00:15 to check for and that will show up on mammograms.
00:19 So lobular breast cancer just forms in a slightly different way.
00:22 It forms in these long strings of cells.
00:25 It can sometimes form a type of a mass, but it has this distinct growth pattern where
00:31 it infiltrates into the tissue and that can just make it much harder to feel and much
00:39 harder to pick up on a mammogram.
00:41 I was very lucky in a weird way to have these two types of cancers at the same time.
00:49 So the lobular cancer that I had was picked up by a pathologist who was looking at the
00:54 tissue under a microscope, but I couldn't feel any of it.
01:00 Other women do sometimes feel things, so that's why it is really important that women know
01:07 not to just check for lumps.
01:09 You must check for any kind of change in your breast.
01:13 Maybe there's a slight thickening of the tissue or it can cause a distortion where the skin
01:19 pulls in or the nipple pulls in.
01:21 There might be some discharge, that kind of thing.
01:26 So any of those kinds of changes are what women need to look out for.
01:31 And then if they have those images and they're still worried about something, pursue it further.
01:37 Go to your GP and ask for more imaging because you can now also have contrast imaging.
01:43 You can have a contrast enhanced mammogram or an MRI, and those are better at detecting
01:49 it.
01:50 So there's a fine balance, of course, between being the worried well and pursuing something
01:58 that you think is not quite right.
02:02 Unfortunately, these contrast images, they're not publicly funded.
02:07 You can get an MRI if you're a very high risk group and that's publicly funded.
02:13 Otherwise you are going to have to fund those images yourself, but that's the way to pursue
02:22 it.
02:23 If you're very, very worried about something and you still feel like you need to have it
02:27 checked out, then that imaging is the way to go.
02:31 Of course, if that gives you the all clear, then you can feel much more confident that
02:38 maybe it's not something to worry about.
02:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]