Birads - what do the Birad numbers mean?

Diagnosed with breast cancer Recently diagnosed with breast cancer
1

I have found some information on birads scoring - at the link below

2

I read that they can determine whether it’s BC or not based on the score .

3

I was told they look at your breast from different angles, they feel for lumps, changes in size either bigger or smaller, do mammograms (xray pictures of the breast from different angles) and move on to biopsies of any suspicious areas. My feeling is the only really reliable tests are the pathology ones which use slices of any lumps, The best kind of biopsy is the core biopsy where they take a large sample of a maybe detailed examination of three sample cores of suspicious areas of breast tissue.

These need to be examined by a pathologist using an electron microscope which can identify the suspicious patterns of abnormal cancer cells. These are cells that don’t die, they just keep multiplying, breaking through the tissue around them, moving round the body through the lymph system or via veins into the blood stream. The mobile cancer cells find another area to occupy and can form tumours in a number of places e.g. the bones, lungs, brain or all sorts of other organs. The most common area is to the bones.

Not very cheery, but as this happens first at a molecular level and the process isn’t completely understood, treatment aims to make it more difficult for cancer cells to enter the bones by strenthening them with biphosphonate infusions, no doubt there are many other treatments as there are many varieties of breast cancer, ductal and lobular, ER -, ER +, HER2 + and HER2-

So generalisations are hard without doing all the tests and using the results to plan for each patient individually. Seagulls

4

The BI-RADS score defines whether a mammogram shows nothing (1) to definite malignancy (5). A zero (0) score means it is incomplete. This shows the scale (sorry for the size!)

Screenshot_20240616_224911_Chrome|690x258

5

Up to a point. The highest score indicates 95% certainty of cancer, but they need a biopsy of cells followed by a pathology report on the cells after looking at the tissue under a microscope and staining the tissue too