Most breast lumps found in women need to be looked at under the microscope to make sure they’re not cancer. But new research says too many women are getting unnecessarily aggressive open biopsies, which produce a scar, when most of them could get enough tissue for sampling with a simple needle stick.
About 1.6 million breast biopsies are done every year in the United States, with about 200,000 of those resulting in a diagnosis of invasive cancer, which requires more treatment. That means that about seven in eight women who undergo biopsy receive the good news of no cancer (or the pre-invasive diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ).
Needle biopsy is the gold standard for the initial investigation of most suspicious breast lumps, except for those that a needle cannot reach. It can be done with numbing local anesthetic and a quick needle stick, which sometimes needs to be guided by x-ray imaging when the lump cannot be felt. In that case the needle biopsy is done by a radiologist, not a surgeon.
An open biopsy requires a one-inch incision, which leaves a scar, and must be done with either general anesthesia or sedation. It costs about twice as much as a needle biopsy, both for the surgeon’s fee and the hospital’s fee. And that could be the economic motivator for the persistently high rates of open biopsies still done in the U.S., according to researchers.
The new study of breast biopsies in Florida found that three in ten were done by the more expensive and scarring open technique, when the rate should be less than one in ten.
A New York Times piece on the new study quoted Dr. Melvin J. Silverstein, a breast cancer surgeon at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, Calif., as saying it was “outrageous” that 30 percent of breast biopsies were done by surgery. The article went on:
He said some of the unnecessary procedures were being performed by surgeons who did not want to lose biopsy fees by sending patients to a radiologist.
“I hate to even say that,” Dr. Silverstein said. “But I don’t know how else to explain these numbers.”