Atypical medullary carcinoma of the breast metastatic to the oral cavity.

Breast cancer presently accounts for 27% of cancer diagnoses in women.’ It has been only since 1985 that breast carcinoma has been supplanted by lung carcinoma as a cause for cancer death in w0men.l Treatment of locoregional breast carcinoma generally consists of surgical resection and, depending on the initial stage of disease, adjuvant chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy. In contrast, metastatic disease is generally considered to be incurable by current treatment modalities. Therapy usually consists of palliative chemotherapy with surgery or radiotherapy reserved for local disease control. Various histological subtypes of breast carcinoma differ with regard to presentation and prognosis. Medullary carcinoma constitutes approximately 5% of breast carcinomas. It occurs in a younger patient population, seems to have a lower frequency of axillary metastases, and has improved long-term survival.2r3 A histological variant of medullary carcinoma, atypical medullary carcinoma, possesses only a portion of the favorable histological features of medullary carcinoma. In addition, a higher incidence of lymph node involvement and development of metastatic disease is found as compared with medullary carcinoma.3