Division of Plastic Surgery, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, USA.
Breast Dis. 2021;40(3):191-197. doi: 10.3233/BD-201067.
Breast cancer is the most frequent cause of secondary lymphedema. Besides being progressive and chronic, lymphedema is usually hard to treat. That is why the clinicians are more focused on the prevention of its development and progression.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the possible relationship between the age of patients and the severity of breast cancer-related lymphedema (BCRL).
PubMed, Scopus, and Ovid MEDLINE databases were searched for articles, which described the relationship between aging and BCRL development. Two authors searched for and selected articles independently.
Out of 562 studies selected, 8 studies met the inclusion criteria. However, 2 papers had the same study population, so only 7 were included in the final analysis. The total number of patients in those 7 studies was 3,904. Five out of 7 studies included in our review depicted the association of more severe forms of BCRL with older age.
The final analysis showed that aging is related to the severity of BCRL. However, due to heterogeneity in study outcome reporting, the cause and effect relationship could not be determined.
乳腺癌是继发性淋巴水肿最常见的原因。除了呈进行性和慢性外，淋巴水肿通常难以治疗。这就是为什么临床医生更关注其发展和进展的预防。
本研究旨在评估患者年龄与乳腺癌相关淋巴水肿（BCRL）严重程度之间的可能关系。
在 PubMed、Scopus 和 Ovid MEDLINE 数据库中搜索描述年龄与 BCRL 发展之间关系的文章。两名作者独立搜索和选择文章。
在选择的 562 项研究中，有 8 项符合纳入标准。然而，有 2 篇论文的研究人群相同，因此只有 7 篇论文被纳入最终分析。这 7 项研究的总患者人数为 3904 人。我们综述中纳入的 7 项研究中有 5 项表明，BCRL 更严重的形式与年龄较大有关。
最终分析表明，衰老与 BCRL 的严重程度有关。然而，由于研究结果报告的异质性，无法确定因果关系。
