Breast reconstructions are plastic surgeries that female patients, who have undergone mastectomies, are increasingly using. While the morphological results are appreciated by patients themselves as being more and more satisfactory, results in terms of sensitivity remain uncertain and depend on type of reconstruction used. The chest wall skin already desensitized by mastectomy and exposed to radiotherapy presents disturbance of blood supply and innervation, likely responsible for impaired local thermoregulation that can easily lead to thermal burn injuries. Our paper presents a rare ethiopathological burn entity on the reconstructed breast: the association between short sun exposure and wearing black clothes. This aetiology of burns must be known by patients and by plastic surgeons in order to prevent dramatic clinical situations leading up to the loss of the reconstruction.
Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier SAS.