Men’s breast cancer differs in some ways from women’s, new research finds.

 

One important difference is in the rates of survival. The study found that while survival for men with breast cancer has improved, it hasn’t kept pace with the strides made in treating breast cancer in women.

 

“Although, we saw a significant improvement in overall survival for male breast cancer patients over time, the prognosis for men with breast cancer has not been improving as much as for women with the disease,” Dr. Fatima Cardoso, director of the breast unit at the Champalimaud Cancer Centre in Lisbon, Portugal, said in a news release from the American Association for Cancer Research.

 

 

“This is largely because male breast cancer is a rare disease — it accounts for just one per cent of breast cancers — and we know very little about its biology and how best to treat patients,” Cardoso said.

 

In the new study, Cardoso and her team followed more than 1,800 men with breast cancer. The men were diagnosed between 1990 and 2010 and they were treated at 23 medical centers in nine countries. The average age of men at diagnosis was almost 69 years old, the study reported.

 

The researchers found that only 77 per cent of men got endocrine therapy such as tamoxifen for their cancer when it was indicated. They also found that even though 56 per cent of the cancers were diagnosed when the tumors were very small, only 4 per cent of the men had breast conserving surgery. Most had a mastectomy, Cardoso found.

 

Most of the men, 92 per cent, had cancer known as estrogen receptor positive, the kind that requires estrogen to grow. In women, 70 per cent of breast cancers are ER-positive.

 

Far fewer of the men’s cancers were of the types known as HER2 and triple negative, which occur in women, the researchers found

 

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