Abstract and Introduction
Abstract
Rhabdomyosarcoma and schwannoma are two of the rarer tumors seen in the surgical setting, and it is rarer still to see these tumors originate in the breast. Rhabdomyosarcoma has an incidence of only 250 cases a year in the United States; of these, more than 90% are seen in individuals 25 years and younger. To our knowledge, only 24 cases of primary breast schwannoma have been reported in the English literature to date. Here, we present the cases of two perimenopausal women who presented with a primary rhabdomyosarcoma and a primary schwannoma at a small community hospital in central Florida within a period of less than three years. These cases provide an interesting juxtaposition to the management of typical breast cancer. Through proper evaluation, such cases can be treated without need of referral to a tertiary center, despite the extreme rarity of their conditions.
Introduction
When describing cancer of the breast, the language is typically confined to ductal and lobular, and from there, in-situ and infiltrating. Sometimes disease processes derive from cell lines outside of these more typical cases and, as such, do not necessarily fit into the normal treatment algorithms. In this case, two very rare cancers were seen in a small community hospital in DeLand, Florida: a 52-year-old who presented with a breast rhabdomyosarcoma, and a 49-year-old who presented with a breast schwannoma.
Rhabdomyosarcoma is rarely seen in adults and represents less than 3% of all adult soft tissue sarcomas; with soft tissue sarcoma representing only 0.5–1% of all breast neoplasia (and all but a few hundred of those are cystosarcoma), one begins to understand the rarity of this disease. Prior to 1994, only 26 cases had been described in the literature. Of less rarity, but still quite scarce in incidence, is a breast schwannoma, which has to our knowledge only been reported 22 times in the literature since 2005.