You Don’t Have to Have a Lump to Have Breast Cancer

The Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation is dedicated to researching the cause of Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC), an advanced and accelerated form of breast cancer usually not detected by mammograms or ultrasounds. IBC can be diffuse throughout the breast with no palpable mass. Lymph node involvement is assumed. Inflammatory breast cancer requires immediate aggressive treatment with chemotherapy prior to surgery and is treated differently than other types of breast cancer.

What is Inflammatory Breast Cancer?

“Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare and very aggressive disease in which cancer cells block lymph vessels in the skin of the breast. This type of breast cancer is called “inflammatory” because the breast often looks swollen and red, or “inflamed.”

Inflammatory breast cancer accounts for 1 to 5 percent of all breast cancers diagnosed in the United States. Most inflammatory breast cancers are invasive ductal carcinomas, which means they developed from cells that line the milk ducts of the breast and then spread beyond the ducts.

Inflammatory breast cancer progresses rapidly, often in a matter of weeks or months. At diagnosis, inflammatory breast cancer is either stage III or IV disease, depending on whether cancer cells have spread only to nearby lymph nodes or to other tissues as well.

Additional features of inflammatory breast cancer include the following:

Compared with other types of breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer tends to be diagnosed at younger ages.

Inflammatory breast cancer is more common and diagnosed at younger ages in African American women than in white women.

Inflammatory breast tumors are frequently hormone receptor negative, which means they cannot be treated with hormone therapies, such as tamoxifen, that interfere with the growth of cancer cells fueled by estrogen.

Inflammatory breast cancer is more common in obese women than in women of normal weight.

Like other types of breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer can occur in men, but usually at an older age than in women.”*

*Citation: “Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. www.cancer.gov, 2016. Retrieved from Web 18 January 2019. https://www.cancer.gov/types/breast/ibc-fact-sheet.