Profile of benign breast diseases in western Saudi Arabia: An 8-year histopathological review of 603 cases

Objectives:

To describe the histopathological patterns of benign breast diseases (BBD) among Saudi patients.

Methods:

This is a retrospective review of BBD reports of Saudi patients of both genders and all age groups seen between January 2006 and December 2013 at King Fahad Hospital, Madinah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Results:

Out of the total 1005 breast biopsies, 603 cases (60%) were BBD. The female to male ratio was 30.7:1. The overall mean age for BBD was 27.5 years, with an age range of 14-80 years. The most common lesion was fibroadenoma (FA) accounting for 44.3% of cases (mean age: 23.5 years), followed by 23.4% fibrocystic change (FCC) (mean age: 37.1 years). Both lesions had a peak occurrence in the third decade. Inflammatory lesions constituted 13.9% of cases. Most common were granulomatous mastitis (3.5%), chronic mastitis (3.3%), and acute mastitis with abscess (3.1%). Other major lesions encountered were fibroadenomatoid hyperplasia (3.1%), intraductal papilloma (2.8%), and benign phylloides tumor (2.6%). All benign diagnoses in male patients were gynecomastia and most patients (68.4%) were under 40 years.

Conclusion:

In this study, BBD constituted 60% of breast lumps, and were mostly FA and FCC. The BBD peaked at the 20-29 year age range.Breast diseases are a significant component of the routine workload and experience of a histopathologist, due to the increasing awareness regarding breast cancer (BC). Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women with an estimated 1.67 million new cancer cases diagnosed in 2012 as reported by GLOBOCAN,1 as well as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), according to the 2012 Saudi Tumor Registry report.2 Reviewing the recent medical literature of the last decade on BBD,3-6 a number of articles reporting the spectrum of BBD on hospital-based retrospective studies in the histopathology laboratories were found. However, there is only one BBD publication from KSA during the last decade, which is from the Eastern region of KSA. There is a lack of publications on BBD from the Western region recently. Therefore, our study was carried out to observe any changes in the disease patterns of BC. The aim of the present study has been describe the histopathological patterns of BBD among Saudi patients in Madinah, KSA.