"Some women just choose to maximize their risk reduction by removing more breast tissue. That's not necessarily a wrong choice," Gralow added -- so long as women understand that the additional surgery will not necessarily translate into a longer life, although it may mean less worry about having to be treated for tumors that come back.
Dr. Allen Lichter, Chief Executive Officer of ASCO, said radiation therapy is standard after breast surgery and should remove any small tumors that cannot be cut out.
"Now MRI sees these things we knew were there," Lichter told Reuters in an interview.
"They are saying, 'Oh, my.'" But, Lichter pointed out, radiation gets those lesions anyway.
"This is true for almost every new test that is introduced in medicine," added Dr. Richard Schilsky of the University of Chicago, president-elect of ASCO.
Computed tomography, or CT, scans had a similar pattern when first used to diagnose lung cancer, he said. "Lo and behold, the CT scan showed all these little nodules in the lung -- the vast majority of which were benign," Schilsky said.
Just this week researchers reported that using ultrasound in addition to mammograms helped spot 28 percent more breast tumors, but it resulted in four times as many false alarms.
