Breast arterial calcification in association with diabetes mellitus: too weak a correlation to have clinical utility.

A large-scale prospective study was designed to characterize the association between breast arterial calcification and diabetes mellitus. Arterial calcification was seen on the mammograms of 481 of 5,000 consecutive patients. The prevalence of arterial calcification was substantially higher among diabetics (45/106 = 42.5%) than among nondiabetics (436/4,894 = 8.9%). An even more significant association was found between arterial calcification and advancing age for both diabetics and nondiabetics. None of the 31 patients younger than 50 years with arterial calcification were diabetic, and none of the nine diabetics younger than 50 years had arterial calcification. Most important, less than 10% (45/481) of the patients who demonstrated arterial calcification were found to be diabetic. The presence of arterial calcification on mammograms is a more reliable indicator of advancing age than of diabetes, and the association of breast arterial calcification with diabetes is too weak to be clinically useful.