What is Clinical Breast Pain?
Breast pain, or mastalgia, in most cases is a benign breast syndrome. Survey data suggested that about 65% of premenopausal women regularly experience up to 4 days of breast pain, tenderness and/or swelling during menstrual cycle. Breast pain may be associated with the menstrual cycle (cyclic mastalgia) or not (non-cyclic mastalgia). Physicians recognize two types of cyclic breast pain based on pain severity and length: symptomatic pain, which is considered “normal” and lasts up to 4 days, and “clinical” which is more severe, prolonged (6 days and longer) type of pain. Cyclic breast pain occurs in both breasts and it may differ from month to month but always gets worse before a period and it may be associated with breast lumps and/or breast thickening, sometimes referred to as FBD.
