A malignant degeneration of the female breast tissue (lat. “mamma”) is called breast carcinoma. Especially in western countries breast cancer is the most common type of cancer and statistically speaking one in nine women will develop the cancer during her lifetime.
The peak of the disease is around 45 years and the risk increases again after the menopause. Proliferating breast cancer can be divided into two forms, depending on where it occurs:
- The lobular carcinoma, which is located on the glandular lobules of the breast tissue, and
- Ductal carcinoma located in the glandular ducts of the breast.
Other forms of breast carcinoma are also known, but occur much less frequently. These include inflammatory breast carcinoma, which is also the most dangerous form.
The so-called “carcinoma in situ”, on the other hand, does not yet grow invasively (destroying tissue) and therefore has a better prognosis, but a development into an invasively growing breast carcinoma is possible. Paget’s disease of the mammary gland is a form of breast cancer that initially manifests itself mainly through eczema formation in the nipple area. This eczema is very itchy.
While the changes in the nipple caused by Paget’s disease were described as early as 1856, these changes were not associated with breast cancer (breast carcinoma) until 1874 by J. Paget. J. Paget carried out a study on 15 patients in whom he observed that they showed similar injuries of the nipple and a few years later all of them had developed breast cancer. In the following years many more studies and experiments were conducted to find out the pathomechanism (progression/development of the disease). The most important study, however, was conducted by Jacobeus in 1904, who identified Paget’s disease as an interductal cancer. At that time, however, it was still believed that this cancer was a precancerous condition, a cancer of the apocrine glands or a chronic degenerative change in the skin.
