Morphological Changes in Breast Tissue with Menstrual Cycle

Abstract

Whether the breast tissue undergoes morphologic changes in relation to the menstrual cycle had been a subject of debate. Elegant studies performed in the early 1980s provided conclusive evidence of cyclical changes in the normal breast lobules. These studies were almost entirely based on autopsy material and have not been validated in the clinical setting. In the present study, we examine breast tissues from surgical specimens from 73 premenopausal women and use morphological criteria to characterize the stage of the menstrual cycle. Patients taking oral contraceptives or hormonal therapy were excluded from this study. The following histological parameters were used to assess the menstrual stage: number of cell layers in the acini and presence and degree of vacuolation of the myoepithelial cells, stromal edema, infiltrate, mitosis, and apoptosis. The morphological stage was then correlated with the stage of the cycle, as determined by last menstrual period and the usual menstrual cycle length and in some patients with serum estrogen and progesterone levels. The morphologic stage was concordant with dates in 54 of the 73 patients (74%, P ‫؍‬ .001). In 31 of these patients, serum levels of estradiol and progesterone at the time of surgery were available for correlation. Twenty-five (80%) of these were phase concordant by morphology and progesterone levels (P ‫؍‬ .01), and 25 (80%), by dates and progesterone levels (P ‫؍‬ .007). Women with a high morphologic score were seven times as likely to be in luteal phase as were women with a low score (odds ratio, 7.1; 95% confidence interval). Menstrual phase can be determined by the morphology of the normal lobules present within the surgically excised breast specimens. This will permit retrospective analysis of large archival databases to analyze the effect of timing of surgery in relation to menstrual cycle phase. It will also aid the design of epidemiological studies for breast cancer risk assessment.

Telomere Shortening Occurs in Subsets of Normal Breast Epithelium as well as in Situ and Invasive Carcinoma

“…22 Proliferation is most prominent late in the menstrual cycle, after which apoptosis becomes most prominent. 31,32 Lactiferous ducts are less responsive to hormones and proliferate less, similar to male breast. 32,33 Hence, our findings that lactiferous ducts, male breast, and ME cells tend to have normal telomere lengths is logical, since they are less mitotically active, while secretory cell telomeres in the TDLU should shorten with proliferation.…”

Cyclic Morphological Changes in the Beagle Mammary Gland

“…Morphologically, the reproductive tissues (ovary, cervix, vagina, and uterus) of dogs in metestrus have features of dogs in diestrus, and therefore dogs in this stage were included under the diestrus category. Unlike nonhuman primates (Stute et al 2004), women (Ramakrishnan et al 2002;Buist et al 2006), or rats (Strange et al 2007, wherein there are no major differences in the amount of mammary epithelial tissue between the follicular and luteal phases, beagles have relatively scant glandular tissue in the follicular phase (proestrus and estrus) compared to the luteal phase (diestrus). The follicular and luteal phases have been used in a broader sense, since the dog differs from other species in several reproductive aspects.…”

“…In women, morphological changes in the breast in relation to the menstrual cycle had been a subject of debate, however, elegant studies performed in the 1980s (Longacre and Bartow 1986;Vogel et al 1981) and more recently (Navarrete et al 2005;Ramakrishnan et al 2002) have provided conclusive evidence of mild cyclical changes in the normal breast lobules. In the human breast, lobular proliferative changes have been variously reported as peaking in the late follicular phase (Ramakrishnan et al 2002;Vogel et al 1981) or the luteal phase (Longacre and Bartow 1986;Navarrete et al 2005), with the latter opinion supported by more quantitative methods.…”

Validation of Electrical Impedance Tomography Qualitative and Quantitative Values and Comparison of the Numeric Pain Distress Score against Mammography

“…Anatomically the breast is constructed from ducts, mammary glands, adipose tissues and fibrous tissues. There is no way to specifically determine the exact conductivity value of normal breast tissues in vivo, because breast tissues are known to respond to hormonal fluctuation and show changes during different phases of menstrual cycle (Ramakrishnan et al, 2002;Chan et al, 2011). Thereby, rather than focusing in the mean conductivity value of each image, this study focused on the conductive values that appear the most which labelled as extremum value.…”