Breast cancer in women aged 30 and under

Breast cancer in women 30 years of age or less accounts for 2% of all breast cancers seen today. At M. D. Anderson Hospital, 310 young women in this age group were seen, 141 of whom received their primary treatment there. After excluding all those with inflammatory and noninvasive carcinomas, 125 patients were analyzed for survival according to nodal status, lesion size, and pregnancy status. This group was compared to a similarly matched group of 3,380 women over age 30 years also treated at this institution. Young women with negative nodes and those with lesions less than 5 cm in size were found to have significantly poorer survivals than older women in the same groups, in contrast to several recent reports on this subject.