XII Congress Brazilian Society of Surgery Oncology

Skin necrosis after mastectomy

Dr Ruffo de Freitas - Brazilian Society of Mastology, Brazil

The talk today will be regarding skin necrosis after mastectomy. That was a nice paper presented in the Society of Surgical Oncology earlier this year. In fact skin necrosis is a very difficult problem after a mastectomy considering these days the reconstruction. We can consider it mainly what kind of mastectomies we are doing these days that are really different to in the past when we took almost the skin on the breast and now most mastectomies throughout the world the surgeon is trying to consider the preservation of the skin, doing skin sparing or even nipple sparing.

This was a nice prospective, a cohort prospective, study in the US and what it has shown is that they divide into three different kinds of necrosis. The first one is a very tiny necrosis in which the skin was healed in eight days. The second is moderate necrosis and in this case the skin was healed in up to eight days but considered degradation, clinical degradation. And the third one was the severe necrosis and for this case that was necessary as surgical degradation and the skin was healed after the eighth day. What this shows is that smoking increases the possibility of a skin necrosis and also the nipple preservation and the nipple sparing mastectomy also increases by three to four times the possibility of skin necrosis.

This was a very nice paper considering it was the biggest prospective cohort to see skin necrosis. They considered also this multi-variant analysis and they showed this result. So I think that this was a very exciting study and will be very nice to present this afternoon in this meeting.