Breast breast and axilla breast reconstruction

Abstract

Breast diseases are among the most commonly seen in any surgeon's practice. In the United States, approximately 180,000 new breast cancers are identified each year, and 40,460 women die of the disease annually. Fluctuations of this incidence have been noted over the past several years, and the most dramatic change in incidence was documented in 2003 in the United States: A 6.7% decrease was evident, mostly in women over 50 years of age and for estrogen-receptor- positive cancers. The reason for this observation has been temporally related to the first report of the Women's Health Initiative and the drop in the use of hormone-replacement therapy among postmenopausal women in the United States. A decreasing use of screening mam-mography has also been implicated in this observation, and yet questions remain whether this is a temporary phenomenon and whether with time, breast cancer rates will increase again. Worldwide, just over 1 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer annually, and 580,000 will succumb to the disease. As developing countries succeed in extending life-expectancy through better sanitation, more food, improved public health measures, and adoption of lifestyles of developed countries, cancer incidence is expected to increase. It is hypothesized that by 2020, 70% of all new breast cancers worldwide will be diagnosed in developing countries. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.