Male breast cancer

Abstract

The aim of studying the epidemiology of breast cancer is to identify risk factors that could be eliminated or inhibited. Unfortunately, the two major risk factors are gender and increasing age, neither of which can be avoided. Nevertheless, the relative rarity of male breast cancer (MBC) has prompted investigations in the hope that the disease in men can give clues to the etiology of the more common female form. One of the evident differences is the age frequency distribution of the disease: in women it is bimodal, with peaks at 52 and 71 years whereas in MBC it is unimodal, peaking at age 71 (Anderson et al. 2004). In a recent report from the Veterans' Affairs Central Cancer Registry the mean age at diagnosis for females with breast cancer was 57 whereas for men it was 67 (Nahleh et al. 2007). The clinical behavior of MBC is similar to that of postmenopausal breast cancer in women (Fentiman et al. 2006). © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010.