An Evaluation of the Impact of Mental Illness on Postoperative Breast Reconstruction Revision Surgery

Breast cancer impacts millions of people yearly affecting various aspects of their lives—including but not limited to mental health. Patients with a known psychiatric history, specifically generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and/or depression, have previously been shown to have an increased number of revisions after breast reconstruction. METHODS: A commercially available database of 91 million unique patients, PearlDiver, was used to identify patients with breast cancer who underwent autologous free flap breast reconstruction. An average number of revisions were calculated from each group of patients—those with a history of anxiety and/or depression and patients without a history of anxiety and/or depression. A logistic regression was performed to determine risk factors associated with patients undergoing revision surgery. RESULTS: A total of 39,683 patients with a history of breast cancer underwent autologous breast reconstruction between 2010 and 2020, of which 6308 (15.9%) patients had a history of GAD and/or depression before autologous reconstruction. A total of 13,422 (33.8%) patients received at least one revision surgery. Patients with GAD only, depression only, and concomitant GAD and depression received 1.40 revisions each with no significant differences between the control and any of the study groups (P = 0.956). Logistic regression did not find psychiatric history to be associated with patients undergoing revision surgery (OR, 0.94; 95% CI, 0.89–1.00). CONCLUSION: Patients who underwent autologous reconstruction for breast cancer demonstrated no difference in rates of secondary surgical revision, regardless of a concurrent mental health history.