“It’s relatively rare but we do find abnormalities in young women that are just here for a routine mammogram prior to surgery and we’ve had cases of cancer detected before this benign surgical procedure,” the clinical professor and managing partner at the Elizabeth Wende Breast Care center, told HCB News. “I feel it’s good that before surgery, we get a chance to look at the breast with the mammogram so we have a baseline. If there is a small abnormality, we can identify it right away before any surgical intervention occurs.”

She adds that without a prior mammogram, surgery can make it difficult to detect where cancer may be, if a pathologist who examines the tissue removed during the procedure finds signs of a malignancy.

“I’ve had women who’ve come to me after the plastic surgeon sends the tissue off to the pathologist, and they identify cancer in the tissue, but they don’t know where the cancer came from. The breasts just had surgery. It’s very difficult at that point to perform the mammogram and try to retroactively identify where cancer cells may have been. MR can be helpful, but if a patient just had surgery, you have bruising and bleeding. A lot of things will enhance the MR and that will make the MR more difficult. Everything becomes more difficult if you are now going backward.”

The findings were published in the journal, Jama Surgery.

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