News You Can Use
Male Version: Rare but Risky
Male breast cancer is far rarer than the female version—but often more deadly. That’s the conclusion reached in Cancer (April), which reports that men whose breast cancer hasn’t yet spread to the lymph nodes survive an average of 6 years while women diagnosed at the same stage of the disease survive an average of 15 years.
Lead author Zeina Nahleh, M.D., who led the University of Cincinnati study of 612 men and 2,413 women, believes that biological and hormonal differences in male and female breast cancers may explain the difference in the length of survival. Because men account for just 1 percent of all cases, they are commonly treated with the same therapies—including estrogen-blocking therapies—developed for women, Nahleh says. But it’s possible that men just aren’t as responsive as women to the drug tamoxifen, which hinders estrogen’s ability to promote tumor growth.
Nahleh says the findings call for more complete studies of male breast cancer—and ultimately, new targeted therapies for men.
