One of the key aims of the Karma Project is to identify the women that eventually will be diagnosed with breast cancer. In collaboration with the Swedish mammography screening program we identified increased levels of mammographic density, microcalcifications and suspicious lumps in the breast as key factors for breast cancer risk. We created a risk model to identify the women who are at high risk after a negative mammography to develop breast cancer until the next mammography visit. In the paper (Eriksson et al, 2017) we show that the high-risk women had a nearly 9-fold increased risk of breast cancer compared to the low risk women. In the full model, also accounting for age of the woman, body-mass-index, use of hormonal replacement therapy, and family history of breast cancer, we identified a small proportion of women who had a very high risk for breast cancer within two years after a regular mammography visit.
The paper was published in Breast Cancer Research, March 2017.
Eriksson M, Czene K, Pawitan Y, Leifland K, Darabi H, Hall P. A clinical model for identifying the short-term risk of breast cancer. Breast Cancer Res. 2017 Mar 14;19(1):29. doi: 10.1186/s13058-017-0820-y. PMID: 28288659