Pregnancy-associated breast cancer -- special features in diagnosis and treatment.

For obvious psychological reasons it is difficult to associate pregnancy -- a life-giving period of our existence -- with life-threatening malignancies. Symptoms pointing to malignancy are often ignored by both patients and physicians, and this, together with the greater difficulty of diagnostic imaging, probably results in the proven delay in the detection of breast cancers during pregnancy. The diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer are becoming more and more important, as the fulfillment of the desire to have children is increasingly postponed until a later age associated with a higher risk of carcinoma, and improved cure rates of solid tumors no longer exclude subsequent pregnancies. The following article summarizes the special features of the diagnosis and primary therapy of pregnancy-associated breast cancer with particular consideration of cytostatic therapy.