Breast reduction surgery and breast cancer

The international plastic surgery journal, Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, has just accepted a paper I wrote with a very promising young medical student, Faiza Hassan.  In the paper we reviewed the records and the pathology of over 1,500 breast reduction patients.  We were specifically looking at rates of undiagnosed and unsuspected breast cancer.  The findings were very interesting: patients who had a previous history of breast cancer in one breast were much more likely to have an undiagnosed breast cancer found by chance on the other side that was being reduced for symmetry.  On the other hand, no woman under 35-years without a family history of breast cancer had anything significant discovered.  The implications from this study were that there is no benefit of sending breast reduction specimens off to the laboratory for young women with no family history of breast cancer.  This endorses the suggestions from the Royal College of Pathologists.  This may have health economic benefits for the state as well as individual patients.