Definition
The term “fibrocystic changes” (FCs) covers a wide variety of clinical and pathological conditions from painful breast to solid lump, multiple cysts, or diffuse nodularity. These abnormalities are noncancerous disorders and do not represent a specific disease but rather a sign of response of the breast tissue to hormone levels in different phases of women life. Since FCs are the most frequent breast abnormalities, the previous definition referred as “fibrocystic breast disease” was abandoned in favor of “fibrocystic breast changes,” as stated in a consensus meeting in New York in 1985 (Hutter et al. 1986). In addition, for some authors this entity may be simply an “aberration of normal development and involution of tissue breast,” in which the diagnostic definition of FCs is more quantitative than qualitative (Tot et al. 2014). However, it is necessary to underline that the term...
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Castellano, I., Metovic, J. (2018). Fibrocystic Breast Changes. In: van Krieken, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Pathology. Encyclopedia of Pathology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28845-1_4707-1
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