Mastitis and breast cancer

Breast cancer and mastitis
Lifetime risk for breast cancer is significantly reduced for women who were pregnant and breastfeeding. Mastitis episodes do not appear to influence lifetime risk of breast cancer.

Mastitis does however cause great difficulties in diagnosis of breast cancer and delayed diagnosis and treatment can result in worse outcome.

Breast cancer may coincide with mastitis or develop shortly afterwards. All suspicious symptoms that do not completely disappear within 5 weeks must be investigated.

Breast cancer incidence during lactation is assumed to be the same like in controls. Diagnosis during lactation is particularly problematic, often leading to delayed diagnosis.

Some data suggests that breast cancer incidence is increased following episodes of nonpuerperal mastitis and special care is required for followup cancer prevention screening.

A very serious type of breast cancer called inflammatory breast cancer presents with similar symptoms as mastitis. It is the most aggressive type of breast cancer with the highest mortality rate.

Case reports indicate that inflammatory breast cancer symptoms can flare up following injury or inflammation making it even more likely to be mistaken for mastitis. Because inflammatory breast cancer is mostly EGF positive this may be a reaction of a preexisting asymptomatic cancer to local cytokine stimulation following the normal injury or inflammatory response.