Breast Cancer – Inflammatory Breast Carcinoma

Transcript

At its initial onset, inflammatory breast carcinoma as well as mastitis can look very, very similar, but their clinical course is much different. And as I said earlier, antibiotics will basically treat the mastitis and it will resolve itself. Those that persist, unfortunately, we have to have a high suspicion of inflammatory breast cancer, and that’s an unfortunate diagnosis. It does have usually a worse prognosis. And basically what inflammatory breast carcinoma is and why it presents itself in that way as an infection is because you have an invasion of the dermal lymphatics. That means microscopic cancer cells invading the skin and the underlining tissue below. Once you’ve been diagnosed with inflammatory breast carcinoma, your clinical treatment is a little different than most patients with breast cancer. Those patients will actually go on to have chemotherapy prior to having any surgery. So your cancer is a little bit different, and the reason for that is because this is a more aggressive subtype and the cancer is already in multiple areas of the breast. And those patients benefit better having chemotherapy in the front end to get control of this cancer. So you can have a better prognosis. So surgery is not the first line defense of a patient diagnosed with inflammatory breast carcinoma.