Few Regret Undergoing Gender-Affirming Mastectomies

THURSDAY, Aug. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) – For people who are transmasculine or nonbinary, getting a gender-affirming mastectomy can be life-changing.

Now, a new study finds there are high levels of satisfaction and low levels of regret for patients years after the procedure is performed.

Researchers from the University of Michigan found an overwhelmingly positive response after the surgery. The median satisfaction score was a 5 on a 5-point scale. The median decision regret score was 0.0 on a 100-point scale, where lower scores mean less regret.

None of the patients in the study later pursued a reversal of their mastectomy.

For the study, researchers analyzed records for 235 patients and sent a survey to all of them. They received responses from 139 patients who had undergone their mastectomies at least two years earlier and as much as 20 years ago.

The survey questions had been previously validated for their ability to measure satisfaction and regret in other medical and surgical conditions.

“We wanted to make sure that our questions would produce quality data that could be compared to other conditions when looking at satisfaction and regret levels for gender-affirming care,” study co-author Dr. Megan Lane said in a university news release. She is a plastic surgery resident at Michigan Medicine.

The authors weren't able to look for other factors related to dissatisfaction with gender-affirming mastectomies because the dissatisfaction numbers were too low.

The findings were published Aug. 9 in the journal JAMA Surgery.

More information

The Association of American Medical Colleges has more on gender-affirming care.

SOURCE: Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan, news release, Aug. 9, 2023