Rare But Dangerous: Male Breast Cancer

Men can contract breast cancer same as a woman, although the number of cases are very, very rare. It is much more common in older men, although young men are in danger from it as well.

Obesity, testicle surgery, liver disease, and exposure to radiation or estrogen-related drugs all increase the risk factors for male breast cancer.

Noticing the symptoms early is the key to kicking male breast cancer. Unfortunately, whereas women have been conditioned to self-examine their breasts from a young age onward, men don't do it as much and report anomalies to their doctors even less. Be on the lookout for:

• A painless lump or thickening in your breast tissue
• Changes to the skin covering your breast, such as dimpling, puckering, redness or scaling
• Changes to your nipple, such as redness or scaling, or a nipple that begins to turn inward
• Discharge from your nipple

If you spy any of these, see your doctor. He will likely schedule you for a mammogram and/or an ultrasound scan. Later, he may take a biopsy by inserting a needle into your chest and removing a tissue sample which can then be analyzed in a laboratory.

If your doctor determines that your cancer is hormone-sensitive, he may recommend hormone therapy. This makes use of the medication tamoxifen – the only hormone therapy that has proven effective for male breast cancer.

Other treatments for male breast cancer include chemotherapy – the use of injected chemicals to kill the cancer – and radiation therapy, which involves the use of directed energy beams at your chest. Both treatments come with uncomfortable side effects.

Because the lifetime risk of a man developing breast cancer is so rare (about 1 in a thousand), it has been difficult for scientists to piece together a group of patients large enough to create a study that could lead to any meaningful breakthroughs. Consequently, doctors have traditionally treated breast cancer in men the same way they do in women. What else can they do?

Nevertheless, researchers working at the University of Leeds in the UK believe they are on to something. They were able to round up 697 men with breast cancer for a study, and discovered two proteins expressed by cancerous tumors in men who proved two and a half times less likely to survive than men whose tumor samples did not express these proteins. Scientists are hopeful that this discovery will enable the development of new drugs that, by targeting these proteins, will kill the cancer.

Sources: The Mayo Clinic