Case report: implantation of breast cancer in a transplanted nipple: a plea for preoperative screening.

A 45-year-old, white woman, following mastectomy for a large inflammatory carcinoma of the left breast with multiple involved nodes, had her nipple body-banked in her left groin. She subsequently developed locally recurrent breast carcinoma in the areola of the transplanted nipple with metastases to the groin nodes, for which she received a radical groin dissection. Clinical and pathologic criteria for screening the nipples to be preserved are reviewed, and a plea is made for employing similarly stringent screens to eliminate future cases such as this.