And the surgeon, who years ago said she had ''problems'' with using hormones to avoid menopause, is once again promoting a controversial way of dealing with breast cancer. It's my fantasy that someday women will go in for a nipple ductal check the same way we get pap smears,'' she said in a telephone interview. The ductal lavage test does resemble a pap smear. Since it is widely believed that all breast cancers begin in the ducts, the test is designed as an early screening tool. ''Breast cancers are 8 to 10 years old by the time we feel them,'' Love says. Mammograms don't always catch cancers before they spread and often miss cancers in the early stages.
Women have said it is less painful than a mammogram,'' Love says.
One of the things I'm hoping we can use this for is to monitor women and figure out who can take hormone replacement therapy,'' Love says. Meanwhile, there are the basic preventive techniques and treatments, outlined in her book. New data is backing up Love's long-standing assertions about the link between breast cancer and hormone replacement therapy. In a study released last week, researchers reported that post-menopausal women with a genetic predisposition to breast cancer are three times more likely to develop the disease if they took birth control pills. The study particularly focused on women who took the early form of birth control pills, which contained higher dosages of hormones than today's birth control pills.