skin of the breast so that it may look and feel like an orange peel.
Other signs are a retracted or inverted nipple, one breast appearing larger than the other or feeling warmer and heavier than the other, and a breast that may be tender, painful or itchy.
Swelling of the lymph nodes under the arms or near the collarbone can also be a sign.
Some of these symptoms can also signal an infection, so a doctor may initially treat a patient with antibiotics before doing more tests if symptoms don’t clear.
IBC should be considered a stronger possibility if a woman with symptoms is not pregnant or breastfeeding or has already gone through menopause, according to the Cancer Society.
What next?
Diagnosis involves imaging tests like a mammogram, breast ultrasound or breast MRI, as well as a biopsy of breast tissue. That means removing a small piece of breast tissue for evaluation in a lab.
If IBC has not spread beyond the breast, treatment usually begins with chemotherapy, followed by surgery to remove the cancer. Radiation and other more targeted drug therapies are given after surgery, according to Cancer Society.
If IBC has spread, it is treated with chemotherapy, hormone therapy and targeted drug therapy.
“There is encouraging news in the form of new drugs and treatment combinations for IBC,” Dahut says. “Specific drug combinations or combinations of drugs and radiation therapy are being tested to help keep the cancer from returning. For advanced disease, treatments that include new targeted therapies are being studied and certain immunotherapy drugs have already been approved for treatment of IBC that is triple negative.”