Contralateral breast mastectomy

aimeevrn

I have IDC ER/PR+, Her-2 negative and had a single mastectomy. I am wondering how common it is to get breast cancer on the contralateral breast? I am not sure if I want to take the other breast now. I couldn't do it the first time because they had to do a latissiums flap reconstruction. I am on endocrine therapy.

Beesie

Having had breast cancer once, your risk to be diagnosed again with a new primary (different from a recurrence of your first cancer) is higher than the average woman. While we are all higher risk after our first diagnosis, how high your risk is depends in part on personal and family breast and health history, such as if you carry a genetic mutation, if you have a strong family history of breast cancer, if you have high breast density (particularly post-menopausally).

From my reading, it appears that breast cancer patients have between a 60% to 100% increase in breast cancer risk (100% increase equating to double the risk) vs. the general population, although it appears that those with a TN first primary breast cancer (which you do not have, being ER+) have a higher risk than that.

Risk of contralateral breast cancer according to first breast cancer characteristics among women in the USA, 1992–2016 https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/a...

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Second Primary Breast Cancer Occurrence According to Hormone Receptor Status https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC27209...

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Estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and HER2-neu expression in first primary breast cancers and risk of second primary contralateral breast cancerhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC41444...

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Hormone receptor status of a first primary breast cancer predicts contralateral breast cancer risk in the WECARE study populationhttps://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/a...

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Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy: What Do We Know and What Do Our Patients Know? https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2010.33.4482

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Because this risk of a second diagnosis remains with you for life, your total risk depends on your age. If you are young (and therefore have more years ahead of you in your expected natural lifetime), your risk will be significantly higher than someone who is much older. That said, for all women, our breast cancer risk peaks during our 60s and 70s. So for those diagnosed previously, these are the decades of life when a second diagnosis is most likely to occur (I had my first diagnosis at 49 and my second primary at 62.)

Some discussion threads on this board where this is discussed:

Topic: Contralateral BC Survival Stats https://community.breastcancer.org/forum/5/topics/...

Topic: How common is a 2nd cancer in other breast? https://community.breastcancer.org/forum/88/topics...

Have you spoken to your Medical Oncologist about this?