Clinical breast cancer screening is part of the process of confirming or ruling out the presence of breast cancer. Doctors cannot come to a definitive breast cancer diagnosis until the patient has undergone diagnostic testing. The signs and symptoms a woman has may or may not indicate the presence of breast cancer. Your symptoms could be a lump in the breast, dimpling of the skin on the breast, and an inverted nipple. Your doctor will not be able to tell, just by looking and feeling, if the condition of your breast is malignant of benign.

Women should have clinical breast exams with their annual physicals. If your doctor sees or feels any irregularities, he/she will order a mammogram and an ultrasound. Of all the breast cancers diagnosed each year, mammograms help in the diagnosis of approximately 90 percent of the cases. The best way for the doctor to make a diagnosis and treat breast cancer is to catch it early. Women should perform breast self-exams every month to detect changes in their breasts; many times women find irregularities that concern them enough get their breasts checked.

If your doctor finds any irregularities in your breast in a routine exam, an ultrasound may be ordered, so that the doctor can look at the structures inside the breast. Oftentimes, the ultrasound reveals fluid filled sacks within the breast, and the doctor can go into your breast, guided by the ultrasound, and then aspirate the cyst. When the doctor aspirates the cyst, it instantly disappears. There is no discomfort or side effects associated with a breast ultrasound. If the doctor aspirates a cyst in the breast, there is a needle prick and little discomfort.

Breast cancer research has done much save the lives of women with breast cancer. Researchers look for newer and less invasive ways of treating breast cancer. Clinical studies are done to test new drugs and therapies, while weighing the benefits and risks associated with them. Breast cancer research is instrumental in testing new treatments before they become standard in medical and surgical practice.

As part of breast cancer screening, if you have symptoms that may look like breast cancer, your doctor may do a ductal lavage. The doctor inserts a needle into the breast to aspirate fluid from the ducts. The sample is sent to a lab where it is studied under a microscope to look for the presence of cancer cells. A ductal lavage can be a bit uncomfortable, especially if the breast is already tender in the area being aspirated.

There could be other tests involved before a definitive diagnosis can be made. A CT (computed tomography) scan might be ordered, especially if the doctor suspects that a patient’s breast cancer might have metastasized to other parts of the body. Breast cancer often metastasizes into bone tissue.

If a woman has a positive breast cancer diagnosis, she may need to undergo other tests to confirm or rule out the spreading of cancer cells from the breast to other areas of the body. A CT scan can detect tumors in soft tissue, and the radiologist can determine the size of the tumor by reading the scan. A CT scan, besides being able to spot the spreading of cancer to other parts of the body, can be used to obtain a biopsy to remove a small amount cells to check for the presence of cancerous tissue. The patient may be given a contrast medium to drink or take in a vein to highlight areas of the body. In diagnosing breast cancer, contrast-enhanced CT scans are a very viable way of finding tumors and lesions that cannot be felt in a physical exam. It may take weeks for the doctor to diagnose the extent of a woman’s breast cancer. The initial breast cancer diagnosis may confirm the woman has cancer; however, further testing may be necessary to determine if the cancer has spread other parts of the body.