Association of chronic cystic mastopathy, xeromammographic patterns, and cancer

The Breast Cancer Demonstration and Detection Project in Louisville (BCDDP-L) screened 10,128 women for cancer. From this screening, another project evolved wherein those patients diagnosed as having chronic cystic mastopathy (CCM) were followed over a 10-year period to evaluate any association between CCM and breast cancer. In all, 1396 breast biopsies were performed, with 165 cancers being diagnosed either on initial screening or during subsequent years. Three of these are excluded, since histopathologic slides could not be obtained for central review. Of this group, cancer was associated with CCM in 116 specimens and without CCM in 46 specimens. One subset of 355 patients with biopsy-proven CCM but no breast cancer was followed for 6 to 12 years, for a total of 2443.5 woman-years of observation. Within this subset, a total of only four cancers occurred (4 cancers/2443.5 woman-years for 0.00164 cancers/woman-years). This incidence is not significantly different from the expected value. However, an estimate is provided as to the power of the test that could be obtained from a larger sample size derived from other BCDDPs. This group of 355 women was sorted into subsets by establishing a matrix matching ten histopathologic subdivisions of CCM against six subdivisions of Wolfe's xeromammographic (XM) patterns. The numbers of cancers in each cell of this matrix is reported. The results found no concentration of these four cancers in this matrix.