What is the cause of the breast lump?

Breast disease is a disease that women are very likely to suffer from, especially middle-aged women. They must take precautions against such diseases. After suffering from breast disease, they must actively cooperate with treatment. Otherwise, when the breast disease becomes serious, the treatment will be very complicated and it will also cause serious damage to their own health. So what is the matter with lumps in the breast? Many people do not understand it. Let me introduce it in detail below.

What happens if there is a lump in the breast?

Most people accidentally feel a lump the size of a pigeon egg on their breast that is painless and slippery. It is often a breast fibroid.

Breast fibroadenoma is a mixed tumor of fibrous tissue and glandular epithelium occurring in the mammary lobule and is the most common type of benign breast tumor. It can occur in women of any age after puberty, but is more common in young women aged 18 to 25, although it can also occur in men. The occurrence of this disease is related to endocrine hormone imbalance, such as relative or absolute increase in estrogen can cause this disease. So during pregnancy, the tumor grows particularly fast!

Cause: The cause of this disease is the abnormally increased sensitivity of lobular fibroblasts to estrogen, which may be related to the abnormality of the quantity or quality of estrogen receptors contained in the fibroblasts. Estrogen is the stimulating factor for the occurrence of this disease, so fibroadenoma occurs during the ovarian functional period.

Breast fibroids are mostly found accidentally as lumps in the breast. Two-thirds of the lumps are 1 to 3 cm in size, with some being over 10 cm in size and the largest being up to 24 cm. The lesions are mostly located on the upper outside of the breast, mostly solitary, a few are multiple, round or oval in shape, with clear boundaries, smooth surface, toughness, good mobility, and no adhesion to the epidermis and pectoral muscles.

Most of them are painless lumps, and only 14% have mild pain, which is intermittent or occasional or stimulated during menstruation.

sometimes. There is clear discharge from the nipple, but it is rare, accounting for about 0.75%. . Axillary lymph nodes are not enlarged.

This tumor is more common in young women. It usually presents as a painless breast lump that often grows slowly.

Physical examination may reveal that the breast lumps are oval or elliptical in shape; they vary in size, from as small as a cherry to as large as 10 cm in diameter (if the diameter of the tumor is ≥7 cm, it is called a giant fibroadenoma); they are as hard as hard rubber, with a smooth surface, clear boundaries, no adhesion to surrounding tissues, and easy to slide when touched. The tumors may be multiple. Breast X-ray, B-ultrasound, and infrared thermal imaging can be performed to help with diagnosis.

(1) In mammography examination, for patients with a lot of breast fat, fibroadenomas appear as round or shadow-like masses with smooth and sharp edges and uniform density. In some cases, a thin layer of translucent halo may be seen around the tumor. No hypervascularity was observed. In dense breasts, the tumor does not show up clearly on X-rays because the density is similar to that of breast tissue. Some tumors may undergo calcification, which may be in the form of flakes or coarse-grained calcification foci with irregular outlines, ranging in size from 1 to 25 mm, which is completely different from the fine sand-grained calcification of breast cancer.

(2) Ultrasound examination Ultrasound examination can show the soft tissue structure at each level of the breast and the shape, size and density of the mass. The tumor body of fibroadenoma is mostly a round or oval low-echo area with clear and neat boundaries, uniform internal echo distribution, appearing as weak light spots, complete posterior wall lines, and lateral acoustic shadows. The echo behind the tumor is enhanced. If there is calcification, an acoustic shadow may appear behind the calcification point. In recent years, the use of color Doppler ultrasound to detect the blood status of breast tumors to determine whether the tumor is benign or malignant has been very helpful in diagnosing this disease.

(3) Fine needle aspiration cytology examination shows that the needle feels between tough and brittle, and the number of cells aspirated is usually large. The ductal epithelial cells are mostly distributed in clusters and sheets, arranged neatly and without overlapping, like bricks, and have a large number of bipolar naked-nucleated cells. The diagnostic conformity rate is over 90%. A few cells have larger nuclei, obvious heteromorphism, rough chromatin, and cells of varying sizes, which may be misdiagnosed as cancer and cause false positives. Special attention should be paid.

(4) Infrared scanning shows that the tumor and surrounding breast tissue have basically the same light transmittance, or appear as a relatively sharp-edged gray shadow with no shadows of surrounding vascular changes.

After understanding what causes breast lumps, women who experience such situations should first undergo a physical examination so that they can have some understanding of their own problems and choose the correct method during treatment. It will not cause harm to the body and will help improve the disease. Women should keep their emotions stable during the treatment process.