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brain MRI at Stage I?
Hi,
I'm with AlaskaAngel. I never had a brain MRI after my Stage II dx in 1992, and didn't even have one after my mets dx until a year in, when I was getting eye twitches, and anyway wanted a baseline - it didn't show anything.
That was 10 months before I started getting disequilibrium symptoms, and had another brain MRI on an "emergency" basis - that scan showed a 2.9cm x 3.6cm lesion in my cerebellum - too large for CyberKnife SRS! So it grew from undetectable by brain MRI (generally under 1cm for a standard scan, .5cm for a "stereotactic" fine-slice scan) to the size of a robin's egg, all in 10 months. Since then, I've gotten brain MRI's routinely, every quarter, and those have detected <1cm lesions which have been treated with CyberKnife radiation.
It is currently very rare that bc metastasizes first to the brain, even in patients on maintenance Herceptin (without chemo or anti-hormonal tx as well) for some time. Brain MRI's are easy - but not for the claustrophobic, and quite noisy. Also, because each scan slices slightly differently, even baseline results cannot be relied on totally - a small lesion that one brain MRI misses, can be caught at full circumference on the next.
Just my 2c...
Sandy in Silicon Valley
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