Idiopathic Granulomatous Mastitis: Do We Really Regard it as a Surgical Disease Anymore?

Excerpt

In the current issue of World Journal of Surgery, Altintoprak et al. [1] reported their results about topical steroid treatment for biopsy-proven idiopathic granulomatous mastitis (GM) in consecutive 28 patients. The authors retrospectively assessed the complete healing rate in these patients after administering local prednisolone ointment to the affected breasts. However, the study did not include any control group in which the patients were treated otherwise. In this single cohort, all patients achieved complete healing in a mean time of nearly 2 months. After initial remission, during follow-up, only 10 % of the patients had disease recurrence in whom a repeated course of topical steroid treatment again resulted with complete healing except in one. So, according to this study results, topical steroid treatment seemed to be effective in treating idiopathic GM patients with 96 % success rate [1]. …