Squamous cell carcinoma of the breast: a case report

Background: Squamous cells are normally not found inside the breast, so a primary squamous cell carcinoma of the breast is an exceptional phenomenon. There is a possible explanation for these findings. Case presentation: A 72-year-old woman presented with a breast abnormality suspected for breast carcinoma. After the operation the pathological examination revealed a primary squamous cell carcinoma of the breast. Conclusion: The presentation of squamous cell carcinoma could be similar to that of an adenocarcinoma. However, a squamous cell carcinoma of the breast could also develop from a complicated breast cyst or abscess. Therefore, pathological examination of these apparent benign abnormalities is mandatory. Background Squamous cell carcinoma is a well known malignancy of the skin and other organs surrounded with squamous cells such as the esophagus and the anus. Squamous cell carcinoma of the breast is very rare. It is important to discriminate this entity from malignancies of the skin of the breast or metastasis of a squamous cell carcinoma somewhere else in the body. In the literature only some small series are reported [1-3]. Reported incidences of primary squamous cell carcinoma of the breast vary between 0,1% to less than 0,04% of all breast carcinomas [1-3]. We report a case of primary squamous cell carcinoma of the breast presenting as a usual breast carcinoma. However, in the literature there are examples of less typical presentations, for example starting as an abscess [3]. Case presentation A 72 years old white woman presented at the specialized outpatient clinic for breast diseases in the Deventer Hospital in Deventer, The Netherlands. Two weeks earlier, she had discovered a local swelling in her right breast, located behind the nipple. There was no retracted nipple, nor excretion from the nipple. The skin had been red for a while, but this had disappeared spontaneously. The woman was postmenopausal, had given birth to 4 children to whom she had breastfed two. Her family history is relevant for breast cancer, her daughter had breast cancer when she was thirty-five years old. The patient history mentioned a cholecystectomy, hysterectomy and appendectomy and hypertension and atrial fibrillation. She had used some medication against hypertension, an anticoagulant and a tranquilizer. Published: 21 December 2008 World Journal of Surgical Oncology 2008, 6:135 doi:10.1186/1477-7819-6-135 Received: 10 September 2008 Accepted: 21 December 2008 This article is available from: http://www.wjso.com/content/6/1/135 © 2008 Flikweert et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.