INTRODUCTION Background to the study. The breasts or mammary glands lie on the anterior chest wall. The base of each rests on the fascia of the pectoral’s major muscle and supporting ligaments extend from the skin through the breast to the fascia. The breasts are underdeveloped in both sexes until puberty.

At this time, the female breasts enlarge and develop secreting cells and ducts in response to increased concentration of ovarian and certain adenohypophyseal (anterior pituitary) hormones (Forest, 1996).However, the human breast is made up of skin envelop, adipose tissue, connective tissue and glands, which produce milk in the female. Diseases ranging from infection to tumor could affect any of these components. The tumors (lumps) of the breast are the diseases that cause most cancers. The lump can be benign or malignant (cancer), if it is cancer, then the patient’s life may be threatened.

Breast diseases occur in males and females irrespective of age.However, incidence of breast disease especially cancer is of the order of 1% or less in male, hence the breast cancer is of interest especially in female, breast cancer is the commonest malignancy in women in most parts of the world (Forest, 1996). Due to inadequate records, the exact incidence in West Africa is unknown (Oluwatosin and Oluwatosin, 2000). In the UnitedStates of America, the incidence is 85 per one hundred thousand (Walker, Walker and Stelma, 1995) with cumulative baseline risk for a wman to develop breast cancer being 12% ( Handerson, 1995).

In the United States, one hundred and eight thousand and three hundred new cases were diagnosed in 1996 alone (Dow, 1997). In Britain, the lifetime risk for a woman to develop breast cancer is one in every sixteen (Leis, 1986). On the other hand, the disease is unknown in the far east (Oluwatosin and Oluwatosin, 2000). In Nigeria, the incidence of breast cancer is 15.

3% of every one hundred thousand (Ihekiraba, 1991). In Ibadan, the disease rose from...