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Dr. Wasif describes the nipple-sparing mastectomy, explains if this is considered a new procedure, and shares how long he has personally been performing this particular surgical option.
Dr. Wasif:
My name is Dr. Nabil Wasif and I am a surgeon. I am trained in general surgery as well as surgical oncology, and surgical oncology is specialty of surgery where you treat cancer. And one of the cancers that I specialize in is breast cancer, and here at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona we have what we call a multidisciplinary setup for breast cancer, which means that all the specialists you need to treat breast cancer are here on one campus and we all work together.
We see patients not just from the Phoenix area, but from California, from Nevada, as well as a significant people who come from overseas to have their breast cancer treated here.
Nipple-sparing mastectomy – very simply the traditional form of a mastectomy means you remove not just the breast, but also the nipple and the areola. And nipple-sparing mastectomy is a relatively new surgical innovation in which we remove the breast but we keep your own nipple and your own areola, and we have found that cosmetically the result after reconstruction is much better.
If you don’t have a nipple-sparing mastectomy, traditionally what happens is you get a reconstructed nipple and no matter how good your plastic surgeon is, it almost never looks as good as Mother Nature had it. So nipple-sparing mastectomy is way of keeping that nipple and improving the ultimate cosmetic result.
Nipple-sparing mastectomy has being done for the last, I would say, five to ten years, and it’s really taken off in the last five years or so. So it’s a relatively new procedure. You know, we’ve been doing surgery for breast cancer for about 50 years. So it’s only after the turn of the century has nipple-sparing mastectomy become relatively mainstream. So it’s a new surgical innovation.
I’ve been performing this procedure at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona for the last six months. I recently joined the Mayo Clinic here in Arizona, prior to that I was in Los Angeles where I had been doing the same kind of stuff for the last two years. So I have done this quite often, both here, as well as in Los Angeles.
About Dr. Nabil Wasif, M.D.:
Dr. Nabil Wasif, M.D., is a general surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, certified by the American Board of Surgery. He graduated from Aga Khan University Medical College in Pakistan and completed his residency in general surgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell in New York. His interests include surgical oncology, general surgery, GI oncology, breast cancer, melanoma, and sarcomas.
Visit Dr. Wasif at Mayo Clinic