DOI: 10.36347/sasjs.2020.v06i06.004

Pages: 260-264

Breast cancer is one of the leading cancer in Indian females accounting for large incidence and prevalence of any cancer type. Breast cancer management is multidisciplinary and includes surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, hormonal therapy .Despite the emergence of breast conservative surgery, modified radical mastectomy still remains the commonly performed surgery for breast cancer in India .Conventional dissection by electrocautery in MRM is associated with certain degree of operative morbidity when compared to ultrasonic dissection. The harmonic scalpel is now increasingly being used in various surgeries because of its inherent advantages like bloodless field and less lateral tissue injury. However, it is still not widely used in modified radical mastectomy and there are conflicting reports in the literature regarding its benefit. In this study, we evaluated the clinical outcomes between electrocautery and harmonic scalpel in modified radical mastectomy. The study result shows harmonic scalpel dissection reduces the intra operative blood loss (p< 0.001) (mean blood loss in group A was 160 ml but in group B 190 ml), post operative drain volume(p<0.001, mean drain volume in group A was 718 ml but in group B was 1076ml), and less post operative pain(p<0.001, mean pain score in POD 1 &POD 7 was 4.47,1.17 in group A but in group B it was 5.77,2.93). However no difference was found in operative time and local wound complications. These benefits seems to justify the use of Harmonic scalpel in modified radical mastectomy.