An eight-year-old Utah girl has been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of breast cancer after she discovered a lump earlier this month, and doctors believe she may be one of—if not the youngest person ever—to come down with the disease, various media outlets have reported.
According to USA Today and the New York Daily News, Chrissy Turner was diagnosed with a condition known as secretory breast carcinoma, which accounts for fewer than 1% of all breast cancer cases worldwide. She was diagnosed on November 9 after approaching her parents and complaining about the lump, which she said had already been there for some time.
A GoFundMe page set up by a family friend claimed that no specialist across the country had seen a case of secretory breast carcinoma in a child as young as Turner, and that there are only a handful of other cases to compare it to. Her case is being reviewed by top oncologists and she is set to have surgery at the Huntsman Cancer Institute early next month, the page added.
The good news is that despite the rarity of the illness, “it is very treatable,” her physician, Dr. Brian Bucher at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, told ABC. “Chrissy will need to undergo a simple mastectomy… to remove all the remaining breast tissue to prevent this cancer from coming back.”
A closer look at this rare form of breast cancer
Research published in the Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine in 2011 indicates that secretory carcinoma is a “rare but distinct” subtype of breast cancer with a “generally favorable prognosis.” While primarily described as a juvenile cancer that occurs in young children, study authors indicate that the majority of cases actually occur in both male and female adults.
The US National Library of Medicine said that the characteristic features of secretory carcinoma are “pronounced intracellular and intramicrocystic periodic acid Schiff (PAS) positive secretions. The presence of vacuolated cytoplasm is also characteristic of this tumor.” The tumors tend to be more aggressive and nodal metastasis is “more frequent and extensive” in adults then in kids.
“It’s the first case I have ever seen of breast cancer this young,” Dr. Bucher told Today.com. “It’s more common among kids in adolescence, but before puberty is very strange,” he added, noting that there are unconfirmed reports that the disease has been reported in children as young as three years of age. The doctor also said that this type of cancer typically does not spread.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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