Management of Granulomatous Mastitis: A Series of 13 Patients Who Were Evaluated for Treatment Without Corticosteroids

Granulomatous mastitis (GM) is a rare chronic inflammatory breast condition with unknown etiology. There is still no generally accepted optimal treatment for GM. Corticosteroid treatment and/or wide excision is most commonly reported in the literature. Incision and drainage or limited excision alone has little benefit because of a strong tendency of recurrence. Corticosteroids also have a high failure rate and possible side effects. In the current series, we treated GM patients without corticosteroids, except for one patient. We also devised multidirectional deep drainage for advanced and complicated abscesses, which are characteristic of GM. This retrospective study included 13 women who met the required histologic criteria of GM. The mean age of the patients was 41 years. All of the patients were premenopausal. Six patients had breast-fed in the last 5 years. Five patients were under medication with antidepressants. A total of 11 patients developed abscesses during the clinical course, and the abscesses penetrated the retromammary space in 4 patients. We treated 2 of these 4 patients with multidirectional deep drainage and obtained complete remission in 5 and 6.5 months, respectively. These times were much shorter than those in the other 2 patients. The time to resolution in 11 patients was 4 to 28 months. This overall outcome was comparable with that of corticosteroid treatment reported in the literature. Because the natural history of GM is thought to be self-limiting, close observation and minimally required drainage of abscesses without corticosteroid administration remain the treatment modality of choice.