What are the symptoms of breast duct inflammation?

The mammary gland is a gland unique to the female body. As the name suggests, it exists in the female breast. Therefore, protecting breast health in daily life is equivalent to protecting the health of the mammary glands. The most common breast disease is mastitis. The danger of this disease cannot be underestimated, so timely treatment is the first thing patients should do. So, what are the symptoms of breast duct inflammation?

1. Symptoms of acute breast abscess-type mastitis: Mastitis patients suddenly experience breast pain and abscess formation. In some cases, the abscess may rupture on its own and discharge pus. Local manifestations are severe and rapid, but the systemic inflammatory response is mild, with moderate fever or no fever. In a few cases, leukocytosis is not obvious.

2. Symptoms of breast lump type mastitis: gradual appearance of breast lumps, slight or no pain, no redness or swelling of the skin, clear boundaries of the lumps, and no history of fever. This type of mastitis is often misdiagnosed as breast cancer.

3. Symptoms of chronic fistula-type mastitis: There is often a history of repeated breast inflammation and pain, and some cases of mastitis may have a history of surgical drainage. The fistula may be connected to the input tube near the nipple and may not heal for a long time. In severe cases, multiple fistulas and breast deformation may occur, and there may often be repeated pus discharge and inflammatory masses in the breast or around the fistula.

4. The initial symptoms of acute simple mastitis are mainly breast pain, local high skin temperature, tenderness, and the appearance of hard nodules with unclear boundaries and tenderness.

5. In acute suppurative mastitis, the local skin becomes red, swollen, hot and painful, with obvious nodules and more tenderness. At the same time, the patient may experience chills, high fever, headache, weakness, rapid pulse and other general weakness. At this time, swollen lymph nodes may appear in the armpits, which are tender and the white blood cell count in blood tests may be elevated. In severe cases, sepsis may occur.

6. Abscess formation: Due to ineffective treatment measures or further aggravation of the disease, local tissue necrosis and liquefaction occur, and infection foci of varying sizes merge with each other to form an abscess.

Abscesses may be unilocular or multilocular. Superficial abscesses are easy to detect, while deeper abscesses are not very noticeable and are difficult to detect. If mastitis patients have obvious systemic symptoms and local and systemic drug treatments are ineffective, it is important to perform punctures at the painful site and wait for pus to be extracted or plate cells to be found in the smear to confirm the diagnosis of abscesses.