The Breast: August 2019
Volume 46, Pages 48–51
by Andrew D. Baildam
The last twenty years have seen a complete change in
society's attitude to the strategy of risk reduction of breast cancer in
high-risk individuals by means of proactive mastectomy. Once termed
‘prophylactic mastectomy’, risk reducing mastectomy (RRM) was considered two
decades ago not only extreme, but in some quarters almost unethical. RRM is now
commonly undertaken in specialist breast units for women at high individual
breast cancer risk, by virtue of an inherited breast cancer related gene
mutation or from calculated high statistical risk from family history data, and
the efficacy of RRM in reducing subsequent incident diagnoses of breast cancer
has been published from a number of centres.
