Women are satisfied with preventive mastectomy

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

A new study reveals that women who have the unaffected breast removed during breast cancer surgery are generally satisfied with the outcome.
Women who develop cancer in one breast have a three to five times higher risk of developing it in the other breast, compared to women who do not have breast cancer. One option is to remove the unaffected breast at surgery for the affected breast. A team at Wake Forest University now reports on a study of how women feel about this.

They talked to a group of 519 women who had received a preventive mastectomy, as well as surgery for breast cancer, and to 61 breast cancer survivors who had only the affected breast treated. They found that 86.5 per cent of the former were satisfied they had made the right decision and 75 per cent had a good quality of life afterwards.

Fears about breast cancer were more common among women who had not had preventive mastectomy - 75 per cent voiced concerns. This is compared to half in the group who had the preventive mastectomy - presumably the operation went some way toward allaying their fears. That's not to say that preventive mastectomy is a good idea for all women with breast cancer. It does reduce the risk of developing a second cancer almost to zero (the risk will never be zero because it is not possible to remove all breast tissue with a mastectomy). But it does involve surgical removal of a healthy part of the body. Preventive mastectomy may be most appropriate for women who have an especially high risk of breast cancer, perhaps from a family history.

Source
Journal of Clinical Oncology 17th March 2006