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Pathological aspects of core needle biopsy for non-palpable breast lesions

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Abstract

Recently, the incidence of non-palpable or noninvasive breast cancer has increased. Consequently, cri-teria for choosing procedures to obtain pathological materials had changed. Fine needle aspiration biopsy cytology (FNA) and core needle biopsy (CNB) are both reliable procedures for detecting breast cancer. However, for non-palpable lesions, the diagnostic accuracy of CNB is higher. The main limits of FNA are the high rate of insufficient sampling and inability to determine invasiveness. CNB is an established alter-native to surgical biopsy, and CNB can avoid excess surgical biopsies in a large number of patients.

In addition to accurate histological diagnosis, there is interest in obtaining prognostic information from CNB, especially for patients being considered for preoperative (neoadjuvant) therapy. CNB provides useful information about histologic type and grade. However, an unavoidable problem of CNB is underes-timation of invasion. On the other hand, there is good concordance in particular for estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR) between CNB and surgical excision.

Several aspects of CNB remains controversial, such as diagnosing papillary lesions by CNB, problems regarding tumor cell displacement after CNB, and management of lobular neoplasia (LN) on CNB.

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Abbreviations

ER:

Estrogen receptor

PR:

Progesterone receptor

DCIS:

Ductal carcinoma in situ

ADH:

Atypical ductal hyperplasia

LN:

Lobular neoplasia

IDC:

Invasive ductal carcinoma

DC:

Ductal carcinoma

ILC:

Invasive lobular carcinoma

LCIS:

Lobular carcinoma in situ

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Correspondence to Takuya Moriya.

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Usami, S., Moriya, T., Kasajima, A. et al. Pathological aspects of core needle biopsy for non-palpable breast lesions. Breast Cancer 12, 272–278 (2005). https://doi.org/10.2325/jbcs.12.272

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