Conservative treatment of the central breast cancer with nipple-areolar resection: an alternative oncoplastic technique.

Conservative surgery with radiation therapy is the standard treatment for early-stage breast cancer. Nevertheless, the patients with subareolar breast cancer have been often excluded from breast-conserving surgery and treated with mastectomy because of the unacceptable cosmetic effect associated with the resection of the nipple-areola complex (NAC), as well as oncologic concerns about multicentricity or multifocality associated with these tumours. We show a conservative "oncoplastic technique" in which the resection of the central portion of the breast, including the NAC, can allow a wide excision of the tumour with uninvolved margins of resection and good cosmetic results.