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Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
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Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staffTests to evaluate your condition may include:
- Clinical breast exam and physical exam. During this exam, your doctor checks for unusual areas in your breasts, noting the appearance of the skin on and around your nipples and feeling for any lumps or areas of thickening.
- Mammography. Undergoing mammography — an X-ray exam of your breast tissue — may indicate whether the nipple and skin changes are also linked to an underlying breast cancer, as is often the case in Paget's disease of the breast. Even if results from mammography don't reveal any signs of breast cancer, your doctor may want to follow up with alternative imaging tests, such as ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to be certain there's no underlying breast cancer.
- Breast biopsy. During a biopsy, your doctor obtains a small sample of tissue from the skin of your nipple for examination under a microscope. If you have nipple discharge, a sample of the discharge might also be collected for microscopic examination. If cancer cells are detected in the samples collected, you may be referred to a breast surgeon to discuss treatment options.
