New pad softens experience of getting a mammogram

McClatchy Newspapers
Published Thursday, November 09, 2006

Here's how a mammogram goes:

A woman places her breast between two cold slabs, where it's squished and squeezed and compressed like a piece of salami between two pieces of bread.

Relax, hold your breath, don't move. Ignore that anvil-like weight sitting on your breast. Hold it, hold it.

OK. The picture is taken.

Now let's do the other one.

Mammograms are uncomfortable enough to keep many women from getting a screening that the American Cancer Society recommends annually for women 40 and older. And just in time for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month came news of a softer side to mammograms. Some radiologists are using a little newfangled piece of foam called the MammoPad.

Approved in 2001 by the Food and Drug Administration, the adhesive-backed pad -- kind of like an oversized computer mouse pad -- attaches to the compression plates of a mammography machine and cushions the breast.

When the MammoPad's California-based creator, BioLucent Inc., tried to sell it to his clinic earlier this year, "I wasn't really for it at all," says radiologist Mark J. Malley at Imaging for Women in Kansas City. He wasn't convinced the pads would make patients more comfortable.

So he used the MammoPads for a whole day's worth of patients and asked them to rate their effectiveness. They liked them so much he began using them the very next week.

Patient JaneAnn Gorsky just had her annual mammogram. She walked into Imaging for Women, as she has for every procedure, with dread. Then she met the MammoPad.

"I was pleasantly surprised," says the fund-raising consultant. "It decreases the discomfort because what happens is, that machine is cold metal and plastic and it (the pad) goes on the bottom metal part.

"They keep telling you to relax while you're on this ice-cold piece of equipment, so that's the first thing you notice, it's not cold. Then you don't have that friction. All in all it makes it -- I use this guardedly -- a more 'enjoyable' experience."

Malley was also concerned that the pad might hinder the quality of the pictures. But he found that the MammoPad can't be seen on X-rays -- unlike, say, deodorants and antiperspirants, some of which can look like white spots on the film and make it difficult to read.

"We found we got better compression and better pictures using the MammoPad than without," Malley says.

Malley, and many clinics that use the MammoPad, don't charge for its use. One is used for each patient, after which the pads go back to BioLucent, which recycles them into padding.

For carpets, not, uh, bras.