Non-invasive optical spectroscopic monitoring of breast development during puberty

Abstract

BackgroundTanner staging (TS), a five-stage classification indicating no breast tissue (TS1) to full breast development (TS5), is used both in health research and clinical care to assess the onset of breast development (TS2) and duration in each stage. Currently, TS is measured both visually and through palpation but non-invasive methods will improve comparisons across settings.MethodsWe used optical spectroscopy (OS) measures from 102 girls at the Ontario site of the LEGACY girls study (average age 12 years, range 10.0–15.4 years) to determine whether breast tissue optical properties map to each TS. We further examined whether these properties differed by age, body mass index (BMI), and breast cancer risk score (BCRS) by examining the major principal components (PC).ResultsAge and BMI increased linearly with increasing TS. Eight PCs explained 99.9% of the variation in OS data. Unlike the linear increase with age and BMI, OS components had distinct patterns by TS: the onset of breast development (TS1 to TS2) was marked by elevation of PC3 scores indicating an increase in adipose tissue and decrease in signal from the pectoral muscle; transition to TS3 was marked by elevation of PC6 and PC7 and decline of PC2 scores indicating an increase in glandular or dense tissue; and transition to TS4+ by decline of PC2 scores representing a further increase in glandular tissue relative to adipose tissue. Of the eight PCs, three component scores (PC4, PC5, and PC8) remained in the best-fitting model of BCRS, suggesting different levels of collagen in the breast tissue by BCRS.ConclusionsOur results suggest that serial measures of OS, a non-invasive assessment of breast tissue characteristics, can be used as an objective outcome that does not rely on visual inspection or palpation, for studying drivers of breast development.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13058-017-0805-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Optical assessment of mammographic breast density by a 12‐wavelength vs a continuous‐spectrum optical spectroscopy device

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Hair product use, age at menarche and mammographic breast density in multiethnic urban women

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Inflammatory Biomarkers and Breast Cancer Risk: A Systematic Review of the Evidence and Future Potential for Intervention Research

“…While standard screening methods, including mammography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) without background parenchymal enhancement (BPE), do not capture the metabolic activity in breast tissue, there are alternative non-screening methods that can be used to evaluate metabolic changes in breast tissue in association with inflammation. Such non-screening and non-diagnostic methods include thermography, Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT), and optical spectroscopy (OS) [57][58][59]. All three of these methods measure tissue vasculature, and hence may be a biosensor or biomarker for metabolic changes in the breast tissue, which can also be achieved with BPE on MRI.…”