The pathologic diagnosis was a primary non-Hodgkin's lymphoma of the breast and of the 27 axillary lymph nodes removed (diffuse large B-cell lymphoma or DLBCL).
Key learning points:
- primary lymphomas represent 0.5% of all breast malignancies
- the most frequent subtype is diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) accounting for approximately 25% of NHL cases, followed by follicular lymphoma
- they have a typical bimodal distribution of age-specific incidence rates with two peaks in the 4th and the 7th decades of life
- the pushing margins of the lesion (see clinical, mammographic, and pathological pictures) are related to its rapid grow