Regular mammograms might offer a “two-for-one” opportunity to protect women’s health, a new study says.

Mammograms can be used to successfully predict heart disease risk in women, on top of their ability to detect early breast cancers, researchers reported Sept. 16 in the journal Heart.

A new AI model using mammogram scans can provide heart health risk scores as well as those developed by the American Heart Association (AHA) and other expert groups, researchers said.

“By integrating cardiovascular risk screening with breast screening through the use of mammograms — something many women already engage with at a stage in life when their cardiovascular risk increases — we can identify and potentially prevent two major causes of illness and death at the same time,” senior researcher Clare Arnott said in a news release. She is the global director of the cardiovascular program at the George Institute for Global Health in Australia.

The AI provides its heart risk assessment using just a woman’s mammogram and age. Doctors don’t have to input other health info like blood pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar levels. 

“We found that our model performed just as well without the need for extensive clinical and medical data,” Arnott said.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among women worldwide, accounting for about one-third of all deaths — around 9 million a year, researchers said in background notes.

Researchers trained the AI on routine mammograms from more than 49,000 women living in the Australian state of Victoria.

During an average follow-up of about nine years, nearly 3,400 of the women suffered a heart attack, stroke or heart failure, or developed coronary artery disease, the study says.

The AI reviewed the images for arterial calcium deposits and breast tissue density, both of which have been previously linked to heart disease risk, researchers said.

The AI’s resulting risk predictions were about as accurate as the PREVENT calculator used by the AHA to assess heart risk, researchers said.

What’s more, those calculators require docs to enter many different types of health data, such as blood pressure and cholesterol, to assess a woman’s risk.

“Our model is the first to use a range of features from mammographic images combined simply with age – a key advantage of this approach being that it doesn’t require additional history taking or medical record data, making it less resource intensive to implement, but still highly accurate,” Arnott said.

The AI could particularly benefit women in countries that already have effective breast cancer screening programs, researchers said.

For example, more than two-thirds (67%) of women in the U.S. and U.K. get their recommended mammograms, researchers noted.

“We have shown the potential of this innovative new screening tool, so we now look forward to testing the model in additional, diverse, populations and understanding potential barriers to its implementation,” lead researcher Jennifer Barraclough, a research fellow at the George Institute, said in a news release.