Fellowships, Grants, & Awards

Background: While tuberculosis of the breast is an extremely uncommon entity seen in western populations, it accounts for up to 3% of all treatable breast lesions in developing countries. Case presentations: We reviewed three female cases of mammary tuberculosis that were diagnosed and treated in Turkey during the same calendar year. All three patients presented with a painful breast mass. In all cases, fine needle aspiration was nondiagnostic for mammary tuberculosis. However, the diagnosis of mammary tuberculosis was confirmed by histopathologic evaluation at the time of open surgical biopsy. All three patients were treated with antituberculous therapy for six months. At the end of the treatment period, each patient appeared to be clinically and radiologically without evidence of residual disease. Conclusion: The diagnosis of mammary tuberculosis rests on the appropriate clinical suspicion and the histopathologic findings of the breast lesion. Its recognition and differentiation from that of a breast malignancy is absolutely necessary. Antituberculous chemotherapy, initiated immediately upon diagnosis, forms the mainstay of treatment for mammary tuberculosis. Background Despite the fact that more than 8.9 million people are diagnosed annually with tuberculosis worldwide [1], isolated tuberculosis of the breast is an extremely uncommon entity. While mammary tuberculosis is globally reported to account for less than 0.1% of all known breast diseases, it is reported in developing countries to comprise up to 3% of treatable breast lesions [2-5]. In the current report, we have reviewed three cases of mammary tuberculosis that were diagnosed and treated within three Turkish female patients within the same calendar year. Case presentations Case 1 A 45 year-old female patient presented with a 15 day history of a painful left breast mass, an associated sinus tract, Published: 18 June 2007 World Journal of Surgical Oncology 2007, 5:67 doi:10.1186/1477-7819-5-67 Received: 19 December 2006 Accepted: 18 June 2007 This article is available from: http://www.wjso.com/content/5/1/67 © 2007 Akçay et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.