Calcified foci, to cut or not to cut, that is the question

  The amount of information on medical science is increasing, the incidence of breast cancer is increasing, and women are more and more concerned about their own breasts.  Among them, “calcified foci” always make patients very tangled, what kind of situation is this, benign or malignant, cut or not cut, this is really a problem.  I don’t have time to analyze them one by one, so I will talk about some common concerns of patients. For reference only.  Calcified foci are the easiest problem to detect on mammography and are described as coarse calcification, granular calcification, ring-shaped calcification, rod-shaped calcification, fine calcification, mud-like calcification, and so on. The morphology of calcified foci varies from disease to disease, and it is through the different morphology of calcified foci that doctors can speculate exactly what disease is causing them.  Calcified foci are not the same as cancer, so there is no need to be afraid of them. Some breast cancers can have calcified foci, but some benign diseases can also have calcified foci.  Small clusters of calcified foci are the most worrying for doctors, and dense small calcified foci require surgical biopsy.  Coarse calcifications are largely benign and are most often seen in fibroadenomas with calcification, and it is often these coarse calcifications that can be detected by ultrasound. There are also thick breast or “cheese”, fat granule necrosis (more common in autologous breast augmentation) that will show multiple calcified foci on mammogram.  Calcified foci can be benign or malignant, but they are not interchangeable with each other. Whether a calcification is benign or malignant can sometimes be misdiagnosed because the imaging diagnosis is not 100% certain, and doctors make mistakes, so please be understanding in case of errors. Doctors who cannot guarantee safety will adopt the treatment philosophy of “I would rather kill a thousand by mistake than let one go”, and the patient is the one who suffers in the end.  The medication cannot eliminate the calcified foci, whether it is Chinese medicine or western medicine. Please do not come to me for the so-called “conservative treatment” to eliminate the calcified foci of the panacea. The only advice I can offer is surgical biopsy or regular observation.  Other tests (ultrasound, MR, infrared) may not be able to verify the presence or absence of calcified foci, because different test equipment relies on different technical means, and it is normal to find different conditions.  If you ask me to determine whether a calcified lesion requires surgery, please bring a physical mammogram. If you only bring another doctor’s report, I will have to “follow the crowd”.