"This gives confidence that [DXA] is measuring the same thing [as mammography]," she told DOTmed News.

Maskarinec, the lead investigator, and her team studied women ages 30 and older who had a normal mammogram and then measured their breast density with DXA. Both screenings showed "high correlations between left and right breasts, and common risk factors showed similar patterns in both measurements," according to the abstract.

She also took DXA images of the daughters of women involved, and plans to publish those findings. This is to study the relationship of breast density between mothers and daughters, she told DOTmed News.

"We now know something about how DXA performs when used to measure breast density," she said. "This is not practice-changing at the moment, but it does present the potential for future studies...on DXA's use as a new research tool in breast cancer prevention."

Moving forward, Maskarinec wants to use DXA to study adolescent women, with regard to their breast density development.

"Our bigger goal is to do DXA research in young and adolescent [girls]," she said.

Another researcher and Maskarinec are "hoping to develop DXA for young women to give them a better assessment of [breast cancer] risk later in life," she said.

FAT'S LONG SHADOW

While most women know that chowing down on fatty foods is bad for their health, research presented at AACR suggests it could also hurt their daughters - and granddaughters- as the health influence of junk food might echo down through the generations.

In a study presented at the conference Monday, researchers from Lombardi found that not only the daughters, but the granddaughters of rats given a high-fat diet during pregnancy were at increased risk for mammary cancer, even though these offspring rats had normal rodent diets.

While it has been known that daughters of rats given a fatty diet while pregnant were at increased risk of cancer, it was not clear the risk would carry on to their daughters.

"The real novelty of our study is we show there's a transmission of risk from daughters that were exposed to a high-fat diet to granddaughters without any further exposure," Sonia de Assis, a postdoctoral fellow at Lombardi, told DOTmed News.

Interestingly, transmission goes through either parent, as sons also handed down the risk; male rats whose mothers were fed high-fat diets while pregnant had daughters with increased mammary cancer risk. However de Assis was not able to see if the sons themselves, or the grandsons, were at increased risk for cancer, she said.

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