Preventive mastectomy
Surgery
A preventive mastectomy or prophylactic mastectomy or risk-reducing mastectomy (RRM) is an elective operation to remove the breasts so that the risk of breast cancer is reduced.
Indications
The procedure is a surgical option for individuals who are at high risk for the development of breast cancer. High risk women without a prior history of personal breast cancer might consider bilateral risk-reducing mastectomy (BRRM) as an option for minimising the risk of primary breast carcinoma development. The procedure includes the surgical removal of both breasts before any pathologic diagnosis has been made. Women that were previously diagnosed with a breast cancer in one breast (ipsilateral breast cancer) might elect to undergo risk-reducing mastectomy of the other unaffected (contralateral) breast, that is to say contralateral risk-reducing mastectomy (CRRM), to minimize the risk of a second breast cancer development. CRRM has been shown to reduce the incidence of contralateral breast cancer, but there is not sufficient evidence that it improves survival. Women who had a bilateral mastectomy in 2013 were about 10 years younger than those who had a unilateral mastectomy.
This preventive operation pertains to women with these characteristics:
BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation carriers; this is the main indication for bilateral prophylactic mastectomy.
Cancer in one breast and a family history of breast cancer.
Family history of breast cancer.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16394661. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Preventive mastectomy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.