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| Forum | Questions | Ask a Question | |
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Understanding Pathology Results Questions explaining and understanding pathology results. |
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| 7/7/2012 | I have a friend who has extensive ductal carcinoma in situ (stage 0) and had a bilateral mastectomy. The surgeon took some nodes. I thought that was unusual given the dcis is non-invasive but the surgeon said "just in case". I thought they'd forego the side effects of node removal (not sentinel either) and inspect the breast tissue for anything unusual "just in case" with dcis. What do you think? (nodes were negative btw. She has pain, quite a bit under the arm as I did but I had IDC. | ||
| Replied | JHU's Breast Center Reply | ||
| 7/7/2012 | for extensive DCIS there is a high likelihood of finding some invasive cells within the DCIS so standard of care is to do sentinel node biopsy. not standard of care to do axillary node disection. For those having a lumpectomy for DCIS, if invasive cells are found by pathology then the breast is still "there" and can be injected to identify the sentinel node afterward. when doing mastectomy however, if invasion is found and sentinel node done, then the breast is gone and no sentinel can be performed thus causing the surgeon to have to default to doing axillary node dissection greatly increasing risk of lymphedema in the future. | ||
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