Inflammatory Breast Cancer

Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare but highly aggressive form of breast cancer. It is considered a distinct entity with unique clinicopathologic features. Symptoms of erythema and increase in breast size usually develop over the course of a few weeks. The clinical symptoms result from lymphovascular tumor emboli, which are pathognomonic for inflammatory breast cancer. Timely diagnosis may be challenging, as inflammatory breast cancer can mimic infectious disease such as mastitis or breast abscess. However, timely diagnosis and treatment are very important to provide trimodality management as early as possible. Patients should be imaged for distant metastasis at diagnosis. A combination of neoadjuvant systemic therapy, modified radical mastectomy, and adjuvant radiotherapy is standard of care for inflammatory breast cancer and improves local-regional and systemic control. This review contains 7 figures, 3 tables, and 59 references. Key Words: clinical presentation, diagnosis, imaging, inflammatory breast cancer, modified radical mastectomy, multimodality treatment, neoadjuvant systemic therapy, radiation therapy, staging