Insights into Male Breast Cancer

Clinicians have been taught, with some caveats, that treatments and outcomes are very similar between men and women with breast cancer. However, recent studies have called this assumption into question.

Now, investigators have conducted a large cohort study using National Cancer Database (NCDB) data to compare mortality and methodologies between 16,000 men and 1.8 million women with breast cancer during a 10-year period. Men were older than women counterparts (63.3 vs. 59.9 years) and more likely to have ductal histology, higher-stage disease at diagnosis (stage III, 14.0% vs. 8.9%; stage IV, 5.8% vs. 3.8%), ER-positive disease, and higher recurrence score.

At a median follow-up of 54 months for men and 60 months for women, overall survival (…