Acute carcinoma of the breast.

The timely discovery of curable carcinoma through screening and early treatment is compromised by the existence of acute carcinoma with adverse properties. The existence of an acute carcinoma must be considered in planning and promoting any public health program for the control of carcinoma of the breast. These carcinomas will surface under any contemporarily available screening or detection program through no physician or patient error. These carcinomas have identifiable properties, and their occurrence should not be the basis of a malpractice suit, since their evolution is not presently preventable. The available data on actual doubling times obviously provide truncated distributions, since they contain no data on the faster subsets of carcinomas that surface in the intervals between screenings too quickly to permit measurement of size and calculation of DT (act).