Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) is a procedure in which patients decide to get their healthy breasts removed when breast cancer is detected in one of the breasts. More patients are opting for CPM, the rates even increased by more than thrice in a decade. The proportion is on rise despite the fact that research has shown that risk for disease recurrence is extremely low even in case of CPM.

The facts were published on March 11 in Annals of Surgery. Though CPM is considered beneficial, the risk of recurrence couldn’t be always abolished. This can be good for patients with mutations to the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes; this mutation is responsible for raising risk for breast cancer by as much as 85%. However, the surgery is not essentially required for women without the mutation.

The researchers studied data of nearly 500,000 women collected for a period from 2002 to 2012 by Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database, a national cancer registry. All these women had stage one to three breast cancer in just one breast. The researchers followed the women for eight years.

They found that majority of women, 59.6% went for lumpectomy or breast-conserving therapy, while 33.4%of them opted mastectomy of just unhealthy breast. The figure for CPM stood at 7%. The researchers also reported that rates of breast reconstruction surgery also increased from 35.3% to 55.4% during the study period.

Most remarkable fact from their observation was that the rate of women opting for CPM increased from 3.9% in 2002 to 12.7% in 2012. The women went for CPM instead of unilateral mastectomy or breast-conserving surgery. However, CPM couldn’t improve the survival and cancer recurrence rates for those women.

“Our analysis highlights the sustained, sharp rise in popularity of [removing the healthy breast], while contributing to the mounting evidence that this more extensive surgery offers no significant survival benefit to women with a first diagnosis of breast cancer”, said study senior author Dr. Mehra Golshan.