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If you’ve been putting off your mammogram, here’s one more reason to schedule it
By Michelle FalciPublished: Feb 25, 2026
If you’re over 40, you probably don’t need another reason to make sure you’re up to date with your mammograms. After all, they’re the gold standard for breast cancer screening.
But new research shows that your mammogram can tell you about more than just your cancer risk: It also inadvertently captures how much calcium is building up in breast arteries, a factor that influences your risk for heart disease.
“I think that there are some benefits of using a mammogram to get this added information because the mammogram is already being done for another purpose—it’s being done for breast cancer screening,” says Matthew Nudy, MD, an assistant professor of medicine and public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine and the lead author of the study. “So the benefit here is that we would be able to tap into data that is potentially already available to us and extract some additional information to help with cardiovascular risk.”
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