Multifocal Breast Cancer in Young Women with Prolonged Contact between Their Breasts and Their Cellular Phones

Case Reports in Medicine

Volume 2013 (2013), Article
ID 354682, 5 pages

http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/354682

Case Report

Multifocal Breast Cancer in Young Women with
Prolonged Contact between Their Breasts and Their Cellular Phones

John
G. West,1 Nimmi S. Kapoor,1 Shu-Yuan Liao,2 June W. Chen,3 Lisa Bailey,4 and Robert A. Nagourney5




1Breastlink, Department of Surgery, 230 S.
Main Street, Suite 100, Orange, CA 92868, USA




2Department of Pathology, St. Joseph Hospital,
University of California Irvine, 1100 West Stewart Drive, Orange, CA
92868-5600, USA




3Breastlink, Department of Radiology, 230 S.
Main Street, Suite 100, Orange, CA 92868, USA

4Bay Area Breast Surgeons, Inc., Department of
Surgery, 3300 Webster Street, Suite 212, Oakland, CA 94609, USA




5Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology,
Rational Therapeutics, University of California Irvine, Long Beach, CA, USA




Received 30 July 2013; Accepted 19 August 2013

Academic Editor: Hans-Joachim Mentzel 




Copyright © 2013 John G. West et al. This is an
open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.




Abstract

Breast cancer occurring in women under the age of
40 is uncommon in the absence of family history or genetic predisposition, and
prompts the exploration of other possible exposures or environmental risks. We
report a case series of four young women—ages from 21 to 39—with multifocal
invasive breast cancer that raises the concern of a possible association with
nonionizing radiation of electromagnetic field exposures from cellular phones.
All patients regularly carried their smartphones directly against their breasts
in their brassieres for up to 10 hours a day, for several years, and developed
tumors in areas of their breasts immediately underlying the phones. All
patients had no family history of breast cancer, tested negative for BRCA1 and
BRCA2, and had no other known breast cancer risks. Their breast imaging is
reviewed, showing clustering of multiple tumor foci in the breast directly
under the area of phone contact. Pathology of all four cases shows striking
similarity; all tumors are hormone-positive, low-intermediate grade, having an
extensive intraductal component, and all tumors have near identical morphology.
These cases raise awareness to the lack of safety data of prolonged direct
contact with cellular phones.




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