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Breast Ultrasound Analyses on Patients Below 40 Years Old
Annual breast
exams are recommended for women once they reach the age of 30.
Breast cancer does not only affect older women. In fact, women below
the age of 40 can also be diagnosed with breast cancer. Here are
some actual results of breast ultrasounds that show women under 40
that have been diagnosed with breast cancer.
A 31-year-old
woman who was previously negatively suspected to have a lump
somewhere else in her body has noticed a lump in her right breast
that she kept for a year until it started enlarging. 6 months after,
she presented herself for testing. Visual and touch examinations
revealed a firm, mobile, poorly constrained, walnut-sized mass in
the upper outer quadrant of the patient’s right breast.
Through breast
ultrasound or sonography, the 25 x 20 mm lesion with indistinct but
smooth margins, central posterior shadowing, non-homogeneous echo
patter, hypyechogenicity, no deformation in shape upon compression
and no change in internal echoes upon compression. These results
were interpreted as a malignant tumor of size 25 x 20 mm –
infiltrating ductal carcinoma (cancer that starts in the tissue
lining of organs or under the skin).
A 37-year-old
woman hospitalized for thrombosis or coagulation of the blood in the
heart that forms a blood clot, was referred for examination of a
mass found on her right breast. Upon examination, a firm, apple size
mass with marked skin flattening was felt on both lateral quadrants
of the patient’s right breast. Her breast ultrasound showed a 40 mm
area with intense posterior shadowing that seems to have originated
from a couple more smaller focal lesions. The lesions were found to
be jagged, with non-homogeneous echo pattern, has hypoechogenicity,
no deformation of shape under compression and no change in internal
echoes under compression. She was diagnosed to have infiltrating
ductal carcinoma of size 60 x 40 mm.
Another example
of a cancer patient under the age of 40 is a 34-year-old woman who
noticed that a lump in her right breast during pregnancy was
increasing at a very fast rate. She neglected this and did not seek
medical attention until 6 months after. The examinations show that a
large, firm, lump in both outer quadrants of the patient’s right
breast, with bruised discoloration of the skin on top of the mass.
Breast ultrasound showed that the tumor has destroyed the normal
glandular architecture of the scan. The patient was diagnosed to
have a solid medullary carcinoma of size 70 x 90 x 40 mm in the
inner core of the tumor.
Patients need
not rely fully on the results of the breast ultrasound alone, as
this is prone to have results that are false-positive. It is
recommended that patients seek out second opinion through other
tests such as the mammography (using x-rays to produce an image of
the internal organ or in this case, the breast) and biopsy (invasive
test of taking specimen from the mass to be analyzed by a
pathologist or through chemical means) of the mass in the breast to
confirm the presence of cancer in the breast.
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