Mastectomy Overview

A mastectomy is surgery to remove a breast. How is it diagnosed?

Symptoms include:

  • A lump in the breast or armpit
  • Thickening of breast skin or tissue that lasts through your period
  • A change in the size, shape, or contour of the breast
  • Clear or bloody fluid coming from the nipple
  • A change in how the skin on your breast or nipple looks or feels. It may look dimpled, puckered, scaly, or inflamed.
  • Redness of your breast or nipple
  • An area on your breast that clearly looks different from any other
  • A hard, marble-like area under the skin of the breast tissue

Classification and treatment protocol is due to various factors.

These include:

  • Tumor size
  • Tumor stage (how far it’s spread)
  • Tumor grade (its aggressiveness)
  • Tumor’s hormone receptor status
  • Whether or not lymph nodes are involved

Diagnosis usually occurs by physical examination (but not in all cases). Then a mammogram is preferred, as well as a sonar and biopsy to follow.

Post Mastectomy Exercises

Types of Mastectomy:

Preventive Mastectomy

Women who have a high risk of breast cancer may choose to have a preventive mastectomy, also called prophylactic mastectomy.
Studies show that women with a high risk of breast cancer may be as much as 90% less likely to get the disease after preventive mastectomy.

Usually, a total mastectomy – removing the entire breast and nipple – is recommended.  In some cases, women have both breasts removed. This is called a double mastectomy.

Some women who’ve had breast cancer in one breast will decide to have a preventive mastectomy to remove the other breast. This can reduce the chance of cancer reoccurrence.

Partial Mastectomy.

Women with stage I or stage II breast cancer may have this procedure. It’s is a breast-conserving method in which the tumor and the tissue surrounding it are all that’s removed.

The surgery is often followed by radiation therapy to the remaining breast tissue. With radiation therapy, powerful X-rays target the breast tissue. The radiation kills cancer cells and prevents them from spreading, or reoccurring.

There are two kinds:

  • A lumpectomy removes the tumor and a small cancer-free area of tissue surrounding the tumor.
  • A quadrantectomy removes the tumor and more of the breast tissue than a lumpectomy

Radical Mastectomy

A radical mastectomy is the complete removal of the breast, including the nipple. The surgeon also removes the overlying skin, the muscles beneath the breast, and the lymph nodes.
This procedure I have personally only seen in 3 of my patients

Modified Radical Mastectomy

A less traumatic and more widely used procedure is the modified radical mastectomy (MRM). With the modified radical mastectomy, the entire breast is removed as well as the underarm lymph nodes. But chest muscles are left intact. The skin covering the chest wall may or may not be left intact.

After surgery the most common treatment include chemotherapy or radiation as well as a combination of the two depending on the severity of the cancer.

Oral medication can also be prescribed without any chemo or radiation therapy and include drugs like Herceptin that my patient‘s are usually prescribed with.