Publication:

Breast cancer incidence after prophylactic mastectomy: a systematic review

Nowadays, many women in the world are living in fear of encountering breast cancer (BC). In 2020, WHO stated that BC is the most common cancer in the world and the fifth most common leading cause of cancer-related death. The progress made in medical science has made it possible for women to undergo prophylactic mastectomy (PM), which lowers their chances of developing BC. This article will discuss the incidence of BC after PM in women with no prior history of BC in one or both breast tissues. A systematic literature search was done in some databases, namely ProQuest, EBSCO, and PubMed, with a total of 380 articles. After a thorough screening, eight articles that met the criteria were enrolled. In addition, two articles were added from a manual search using Google Scholar. Of those articles, the risk of bias was assessed using the risk of bias tools from CLARITY. All articles suggested that most patients are middle-aged women, mostly around 45 years old. The surgical technique used in most cases is nipple-sparing mastectomy (NSM) due to its cosmetic advantage. Moreover, mutations in the BRCA gene were found to be positive in PM patients. The incidence of BC is substantially reduced after PM, reducing it to approximately 90%. The rest of it still has a chance to develop BC. PM may reduce the incidence of BC. However, further research, specifically on PM, is required to find out the long-term effect and efficacy.