Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC)
What is inflammatory breast cancer?
Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare, aggressive type of invasive breast cancer with symptoms and treatments that are different from other types of breast cancer.
Like most breast cancers, inflammatory breast cancer often starts in the milk ducts, the tubes that carry milk from the lobules to the nipple. Doctors call cancers that start in the milk ducts invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC). But the symptoms and signs of inflammatory breast cancer are very different from other types of IDC.
Instead of developing a lump in or near the breast, inflammatory breast cancer cells block lymph channels in the skin, which makes the breast look red, swollen, and inflamed.
According to the National Cancer Institute, about 1% to 5% of all breast cancer diagnosed in the United States are inflammatory breast cancer.
A 2020 study estimated that 20% to 40% of inflammatory breast cancers are triple-negative.
Inflammatory breast cancer symptoms
A common early sign of inflammatory breast cancer is a feeling of thickness, heaviness, or visible swelling in the affected breast. Your breast also may look red or infected or seem to have a rash.
Other symptoms of inflammatory breast cancer include:
discoloration that makes the breast look red, pink, or even bruised
dimpling, pitting, or ridges on the skin of the breast, so it looks and feels like an orange peel
welts, hives, or other breast skin changes
nipple flattening or inverted nipple
unusual warmth of the affected breast
tenderness, pain, aching, burning, or itchiness of the affected breast
enlarged lymph nodes under the arm or above the collarbone
Most of the symptoms of inflammatory breast cancer develop quickly — within weeks or months.
“In inflammatory breast cancer, there is usually a rapid onset of symptoms,” said Filipa Lynce, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and director of the Inflammatory Breast Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She was discussing treatments for inflammatory breast cancer on The Breastcancer.org Podcast. “No one calls and says, ‘Oh, I’ve had this redness in my breast for two years.’ That is not inflammatory breast cancer. With inflammatory breast cancer, you talk to a patient and she says, ‘This started a couple weeks ago.’”
Listen to the episode of The Breastcancer.org Podcast featuring Lynce discussing inflammatory breast cancer.
What You Need to Know About Inflammatory Breast Cancer
Oct 25, 2024What causes inflammatory breast cancer?
Doctors don't know what specifically causes inflammatory breast cancer or if there are any unique risk factors for it. But like other types of breast cancer, inflammatory breast cancer develops when cells become abnormal because of damage to their DNA. This damage leads the cells to grow and multiply uncontrollably.
Who gets inflammatory breast cancer?
Inflammatory breast cancer is most common in:
women younger than 40
Black women
women who are overweight
“What we haven’t been able to identify yet, is what is the specific driver mechanism of this disease, and in particular why it’s happening more often in these groups,” Lynce explained. “This makes it even more important to focus our research and clinical efforts on inflammatory breast cancer.”
Inflammatory breast cancer or mastitis?
A breast infection, such as mastitis if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, can cause some of the same symptoms as inflammatory breast cancer. If you’ve been diagnosed with a breast infection that isn’t responding to treatment, you may want to consider asking your doctor about testing for inflammatory breast cancer.
How is inflammatory breast cancer diagnosed?
It can be difficult to diagnose inflammatory breast cancer because there’s usually no lump to feel during a breast self-exam or physical exam by your doctor, or to see on a mammogram. If your doctor suspects inflammatory disease, they may order a breast and skin biopsy as well as an ultrasound or breast MRI.
Inflammatory breast cancer stage
Again, because there is no lump, It’s very difficult to detect inflammatory breast cancer at an early stage. By the time a doctor does diagnose inflammatory breast cancer, the breast cancer cells have usually grown into the skin. This means the cancer is at least stage III.
In some cases, the breast cancer cells have already spread to parts of the body away from the breast — which means the cancer is metastatic or stage IV.
After diagnosing inflammatory breast cancer, doctors order more tests to collect information about the cancer’s characteristics. These tests, as well as the results of your biopsy and any imaging tests, make up the various parts of your pathology report.
Doctors also collect the following information on inflammatory breast cancer:
Inflammatory breast cancer treatment
If you’ve been diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, your doctor may recommend that you start with chemotherapy to shrink the cancer and ease the swelling, which makes it easier for the surgeon to remove the cancer. If the cancer is HER2-positive, your doctor may also recommend that you receive targeted therapy at the same time as chemotherapy.
If the breast skin shows little to no signs of inflammatory breast cancer after chemotherapy, your doctor will likely recommend you receive a mastectomy and lymph node removal.
If the breast skin is still showing signs of inflammatory breast cancer symptoms after chemotherapy, your doctor may switch you to a different chemotherapy regimen or recommend radiation therapy before surgery.
After a mastectomy, your doctor may recommend more chemotherapy and will almost always recommend radiation therapy to destroy any remaining cancer cells.
Your doctor also may recommend:
hormonal therapy after you complete chemotherapy if the cancer is hormone receptor-positive
additional targeted therapy treatment after surgery if the cancer is HER2-positive; you receive this at the same time as radiation therapy
Inflammatory breast cancer prognosis
People diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer tend to have a worse prognosis than people diagnosed with other types of breast cancer. Prognosis is the expected outcome of treatment.
Doctors often use survival rates when talking about prognosis.
The American Cancer Society publishes five-year survival rates for people diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer using numbers from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database from the National Cancer Institute. The SEER database doesn’t group cancers by clinical stage (stage I, stage II, etc.). Instead, it classifies cancers as:
localized: there is no sign the cancer has spread outside the breast
regional: the cancer has spread outside the breast to nearby tissues or lymph nodes
distant: the cancer has spread to parts of the body away from the breast, such as the lungs, liver, or bones; this is also called metastatic breast cancer by many people
Relative survival rates compare the survival of people who have a disease with those who don’t over a period of time. Relative survival is calculated by dividing the percentage of people with the disease who are still alive at the end of the five years by the percentage of people in the general population of the same sex and age who are alive at the end of the same time period.
So if the five-year relative survival rate for a specific type and SEER stage of breast cancer is 60%, it means that women diagnosed with that cancer are, on average, about 60% as likely as women who don’t have that cancer to live for at least five years after being diagnosed.
The numbers below are based on women diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer between 2012 and 2018:
regional: 52%
distant: 19%
all SEER stages: 39%
There is no localized stage for inflammatory breast cancer because it has already spread to the skin when diagnosed.
It’s important to know several things about these statistics: People now being diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer may have a better outlook than these numbers suggest, as new treatments have been developed since 2012. The numbers apply only to the stage of the cancer when it was first diagnosed. They do not apply to cancer that spreads or comes back after treatment.
Also, your age, overall health, lifestyle factors, and how well the cancer responds to treatment influence your prognosis.
It’s important to talk to your doctor about all the factors of your unique situation that affect your prognosis.
Survivorship care after inflammatory breast cancer treatment
Treatments you receive for inflammatory breast cancer (and other types of breast cancer) can increase your risk of developing other health problems as you get older, including high blood pressure, heart disease, or osteoporosis.
A survivorship care plan can help you stay on track with regular screenings for these and other diseases and conditions.
Survivorship care plans are written documents made up of two parts. The first part is a treatment summary of all the breast cancer treatments you’ve received. The second part is a roadmap of what you can expect in the years after treatment, including how often you’ll have checkups . The survivorship care plan may also include:
recommendations for tests to check for cancer and other side effects
a list of the doctors who order ongoing tests and screenings
a schedule of when you need to have each test
tips for maintaining a healthy lifestyle
— Last updated on August 14, 2025 at 5:44 PM