The impact of delayed wound healing on patient-reported outcomes after breast cancer surgery

Purpose: Postoperative complications after breast cancer surgery may be associated with de-creased quality of life. It remains unclear whether oncoplastic breast-conserving surgery or mastectomy with reconstruction lead to more postoperative complications than conventional breast surgery (CBS). As delayed wound healing (DWH) is one of the most frequent minor com-plications, we sought to investigate the significance of DWH for patient-reported outcomes after oncoplastic, reconstructive, and CBS.Methods: Our study is a retrospective cohort study of consecutive patients with stage I-II breast cancer who underwent oncoplastic or CBS performed by three breast surgeons at a single tertiary referral hospital from June 2011 until May 2019. Patient-reported outcomes were evaluated postoperatively using the BREAST-Q questionnaire. Comparisons were made between patients with and without DWH. Results: A total of 229 patients who met the inclusion criteria and 28 (12%) of them developed DWH, 27/158 (17%) in the oncoplastic breast-conserving surgery and reconstruction group and 1/71 (1%) in the CBS group. The mean time from surgery to BREAST-Q assessment was compa-rable in both groups (29 months in the DWH vs. 33 months in the normal wound healing group). No statistically significant difference for any BREAST-Q scale was detected between patients with and without DWH. This includes physical ( p = 0.183), psychosocial ( p = 0.489), sexual well-being ( p = 0.895), and satisfaction with breasts ( p = 0.068).Conclusion: Our study confirms that oncoplastic breast-conserving surgery and mastectomy with reconstruction lead to significantly more DWH than CBS. However, neither quality of life nor patient-reported outcomes following state-of-the-art reconstructive or oncoplastic breast -conserving surgery at a specialized center seem to be compromised.(c) 2022 British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons. Pub-lished by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Automated summary

This study retrospectively investigated the significance of delayed wound healing for patient-reported outcomes after oncoplastic, reconstructive, and conventional breast surgery. The results showed no statistically significant difference in patient-reported outcomes between patients with and without delayed wound healing.