Cooper's ligaments are connective tissue

Connective tissue

"Connective tissue" is a fibrous tissue. It is one of the four traditional classes of tissues . Connective Tissue is found throughout the body.In fact the whole framework of the skeleton and the different specialized connective tissues from the crown of the head to the toes determine the form of...

 in the breast

Breast

The breast is the upper ventral region of the torso of a primate, in left and right sides, which in a female contains the mammary gland that secretes milk used to feed infants.Both men and women develop breasts from the same embryological tissues...

 that help maintain structural integrity.

Transmission diffraction tomography

Diffraction Tomography

Diffraction tomography is an inverse scattering technique used to find the shape of a scattering object by illuminating it with probing waves and recording the reflections. It is based on the diffraction slice theorem and assumes that the scatterer is weak. It is closely related to X-ray tomography....

 can reveal the anatomy.

Cooper's Suspensory Ligament should not be confused with the pectineal ligament

Pectineal ligament

The pectineal ligament is an extension of the lacunar ligament that runs on the pectineal line of the pubic bone....

 (sometimes called the inguinal ligament of Cooper) which shares the same eponym

Eponym

An eponym is the name of a person or thing, whether real or fictitious, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named or thought to be named...

.

Anatomy

The ligaments run from the clavicle and the clavi-pectoral fascia branching out through and around breast tissue to the dermis of the skin overlying the breast. The intact ligament suspends the breast from the clavicle and the underlying deep fascia of the upper chest. This has the effect of supporting the breast in its normal position, and maintaining its normal shape. Without the internal support of this ligament, the breast tissue (which is heavier than the surrounding fat) sags under its own weight, losing its normal shape and contour.

Damage

Controversy exists about the role of the brassiere, lactation, breast size, and exercise in damaging these ligaments. It has been suggested that the use of the brassiere in the years before pregnancy and lactation result in atrophic weakening of these ligaments as a result of their not being subject to normal weight-bearing loads, particularly in menarchal and post-menarchal girls.

On the other hand—especially in individuals predisposed to having large breasts and compounded by stressful situations, such as pregnancy, lactation, sports and exercise—there may be times when these ligaments become stretched beyond comfortable limits, causing pain or discomfort. Therefore, it would seem prudent to use a brassiere during these times only, to protect these ligaments against over-stress, and thus preserve the breast's normal contour.

Pathologically heavy breasts are well known to cause pain in the upper thoracic/clavicular area, which is a warning sign from nerve receptors in these ligaments that they are being stretched beyond their tolerance. In such cases, daily use of a brassiere may relieve some of the pain at the expense of ligament disuse atrophy. Reduction mammoplasty offers a long-term solution to this problem.

For the pendulous breast with non-functional ligaments the best option is external support by a brassiere. Surgical efforts to repair or reconstruct these ligaments may produce temporary re-suspension, but the repairs usually stretch out and fail within a year.

Pathology

The suspensory ligaments of Cooper play an important role in the change in appearance of the breast that often accompanies the development of inflammatory carcinoma

Inflammatory breast cancer

Inflammatory breast cancer is an especially aggressive type of breast cancer that can occur in women of any age .It is called inflammatory because it frequently presents with symptoms resembling an inflammation...

 of the breast in which blockage of the local lymphatic ducts causes swelling of the breast. Because the skin remains tethered by the suspensory ligaments of Cooper, it takes on a dimpled appearance reminiscent of the peel of an orange (peau d'orange

Peau d'orange

The French term peau d'orange means "orange peel skin", or more literally, "skin of an orange". It is used in medicine to describe anatomy with the appearance and dimpled texture of an orange peel...

). Carcinomas can also decrease the length of Cooper's ligaments leading to a dimpling.

Cultural references

In popular culture they are often erroneously blamed for causing the sagging of the breast in the mature and older woman. Samuel Shem

Samuel Shem

Samuel Shem is the pen-name of the American psychiatrist Stephen Joseph Bergman . His main works are The House of God and Mount Misery, both fictional but close-to-real first-hand descriptions of the training of doctors in the United States.Bergman was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford in...

 (author of the "The House of God

The House of God

The House of God is a satirical novel by Samuel Shem , published in 1978. It portrays the psychological harm done to medical interns during the course of medical internship in the early 1970s.-Storyline:...

") called them "Cooper's Droopers", referring to a lack of tension.

Robert L. Forward's novel Dragon's Egg

Dragon's Egg

Dragon's Egg is a hard science fiction novel written by Robert L. Forward and published in 1980. In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures that have the volume of sesame seeds and live a...

refers to "Reverse Cooper's Droop", caused by violent sudden deceleration during spaceflight.