Men, too, can have breast cancer

Men, too, can have breast cancer and are as susceptible to it as women, a study has found.

The disease in men is usually detected when the tumours are bigger, have spread the disease and may be more aggressive, compared to diagnosis in women, it said.

However, it occurs less frequently in men. This is also the reason why researchers have a hard time studying the disease and the effects it has on a bigger male population.

Breast cancer among men remains a tiny risk, but for some reason it's a growing one, and experts think obesity is one answer.   

"The incidence of the disease has increased significantly in the last 25 years, from .86 to 1.08 per 100,000 men," Sharon Giordano, author of the study, oncologist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Centre, Houston, said.

"Male breast cancer is rare, accounting for less than one per cent of all breast cancer, or about 1,600 new cases in the US in 2004. While it's not as high of an increase in cases as that in women, men should be alert to the possibility that the disease could affect them," she warns.

As breast cancer in men is rare, little is known about how it differs from breast cancer in women and how it should be best treated.

To assess dissimilarity, Giordano and her M D Anderson colleagues used information from a National Cancer Institute database called SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results), which is the authoritative source of information on cancer incidence and survival in the US.

They analysed SEER data from 1973 through 1998 on 2,524 cases of male breast cancer and 380,856 cases of female breast cancer.

Compared to female patients, the investigators found that male patients were significantly older when diagnosed -- 67 versus 62 years. They were also more likely to have later stage disease and had more spread of the cancer to their lymph nodes.

"It's perhaps ironic that tumours in men are easier to feel than they are in women, yet the disease is being discovered at a later stage in men than in women," she said in a study to be published in the online edition of Cancer Today.

One reason for such a late diagnosis may be men assume they are experiencing a benign condition called gynecomastia, or atypical growth of breast tissue that affects about a third of males at some point in their lives, she said.

Giordano and the researchers also found that the most common types of cancers in men were invasive ductal carcinma, found in 93.4 per cent of the men, and papillary carcinoma, which accounted for 2.6 per cent of the cases.

"Overall survival rates for the disease are 63 per cent after five years, and 41 per cent after 10 years."

For treatment of breast cancer, men take many of the same drugs as women and undergo similar chemotherapy regimens, she added.