Can breast cancer be detected despite breast implants?
Women with breast implants have a higher risk of having breast cancer detected and diagnosed at an advanced stage than women who do not have implants. There are several reasons for this. Breast implants are made of radiopaque material.
This means that they cover parts of the breast during mammography and these cannot be assessed correctly. This means that breast cancer can remain hidden. Furthermore, depending on their location, they make the palpation of the breast more difficult, so that some findings are not so easy to feel.
How can breast cancer be detected in men?
In contrast to women, men do not have breast examinations or only in very rare cases. Therefore, breast cancer in men is very rarely discovered during a medical examination. In most cases, those affected recognise the warning signs and symptoms of breast cancer themselves, followed by a visit to the doctor.
But how do you detect breast cancer in men? In most cases, the affected men themselves feel a change in their breast tissue or even a solid and rough lump. This can be both painful and painless, although the latter is more common.
Apart from such “palpation”, there are also other warning signs of breast cancer in men. Dents in the skin or nipple, which can look like dents, are also suspicious and should be investigated. Another symptom can be fluid secretion from the nipple.
The secretion can be transparent, cloudy or bloody. Even small inflammatory changes in the breast or wounds that do not heal are possible symptoms that should be watched out for. Apart from nodular changes in the breast, nodular changes in the armpits should also be considered suspicious. These can be swollen lymph nodes, which can also be a sign of breast cancer.
Breast cancer detection in man vs. woman
Breast cancer in men is much less common than in women (every year about 500 men and 60,000 women contract the disease), but this “women’s disease” can also affect men. In general, the diagnosis and detection of breast cancer in men is not very different from that of women. Again, palpation, ultrasound imaging and mammography are usually performed.
The imaging (ultrasound and mammography) usually provides a very meaningful picture of the changes in the breast gland tissue, which is due to the much lower glandular and fat content of the male breast. Any suspicious findings from the palpation and image examination should be confirmed in both men and women by means of a biopsy (sampling of the affected tissue) and evaluated precisely with regard to the “tumour identity” or “tumour character” (type of tumour). A special feature of breast cancer in men is that in most cases the tumour cells grow in a hormone-dependent manner and thus have numerous receptors for oestrogens (this is important for possible later therapy).
