Weekend April 7/8, 2001

Suzanne Somers

Suzanne Somers has led a very public life, first as a sitcom star and then an infomercial queen. But now the beautiful blonde is perhaps best known for revealing a very private secret.

Last week the actress came clean about her condition on CNN's "Larry King Live." She said, "I haven't told anybody… in the last year I have been battling and surviving breast cancer."

Somers told king that a mammogram missed her tumor nut a new and improved ultrasound machine detected it. She says, "My life was saved because of this machine."

Dr. Mel Silverstein of the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles is Somers' surgeon. He says ultrasound is a valuable tool when used in conjunction with mammography, especially for women with a genetic predisposition to the disease or those with dense breasts, where tumors can be hard to find.

Dr. Silverstein says, "An ultrasound is kind of like sonar, like a submarine that shoots out a sonar and see things. The ultrasound shoots out sound waves and bounces them off things."

Things like tumors that may not show up on a standard mammogram. By moving the sonar wand directly on and around a woman's breast, doctors can immediately identify darker areas that might indicate cancer. Dr. Silverstein says, "There are clearly cancers that can't be found by mammography that are found by ultrasonography."

And another high tech weapon in the battle against breast cancer is the R2 Image Checker, a machine that helps find cancer at its earliest stages. Dr. Tommy Cupples says, "It's very good at picking up things that are oversights, that could have been diagnosed but weren't."

Dr. Cupples, a South Carolina radiologist, uses the Image Checker as a kind of spell check for mammography. After examining the mammogram, doctors feed the x-ray into the Image Checker, a computer that scans the x-ray, looking for anything abnormal. He says, "The R2 is like a second radiologist reading the films."

Studies have shown that the Image Checker finds 10-15% more cancers per year over just manually reading the mammograms. Even with this cutting edge technology, both doctors agree that regular mammograms are still the best way to detect breast cancer. And the earlier it's caught the better your chances of beating it. Suzanne Somers couldn't agree more.
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