Personal or first-degree family breast cancer history: which has higher impact on tumor detection and tumor size in breast cancer

Purpose A woman’s risk of developing breast cancer (BC) is increased if she has a personal history (PH) or family history (FH) of the disease. We compared the impact of the two risk factors PH and FH on tumor detection and tumor size at diagnosis in a cohort of BC patients. Methods The study cohort comprised 1,037 invasive BC patients (≤70 years at diagnosis). From these, 92 patients (8.5 %) had a positive PH and 151 patients (13.7 %) had a positive first-degree FH. Results Compared to the tumors of patients without PH or FH, the lesions of patients who had a positive PH or a positive FH were more often found by radiologic breast examinations (RBE) (PH: 49.4 %, FH: 43.4 %, no PH/FH: 26.2 %; both comparisons p