Oncoplastic breast surgery (OPBS) takes the principles of breast cancer surgery and combines them with the aesthetic principles “borrowed” from plastic surgery with the view to obtaining both good cancer outcomes and good aesthetic outcomes after your breast conserving surgery.

This may mean that your surgeon will be deliberately re-shaping your breast as part of your cancer surgery. Sometimes this will mean using one of the many breast reduction techniques to achieve the dual goals of good cancer surgery with a pleasing cosmetic outcome. Due to the reduction in volume and size of the breast affected by cancer, you are likely to be rendered asymmetric (unbalanced) so your breast surgeon will offer (if you want) to also lift / reduce your other breast to match. This is sometimes referred to as symmetrising surgery. Naturally, being more involved surgery this means that operating times will be a little longer and you may require a longer stay in hospital commonly 1-2 nights. You will still need to have radiotherapy to the remaining breast tissue to reduce the risk of the cancer returning in the affected breast. Generally women who elect to undergo one the more advanced procedures report high degrees of satisfaction with the aesthetic results from this sort of surgery. Your surgeon will be able to show you some photos of women who will have undergone similar procedures so that you get a better understanding of what is involved in one of these more complex operations and to see what the typical scar pattern is. Not all patients are suited to having their breast tissue reshaped and as with a lot of surgery smoking significantly increases the risk of wound healing complications.