Anyone who has a breast tissue can develop breast cancer. However, not many even know that male breast cancer exists. Male breast cancer is a rare disease as women suffer from breast cancer the most, but it does occur in men too.
Older men are more prone to male breast cancer but it can occur at any age. Just like most types of cancers, male breast cancer too can be cured if diagnosed at an early stage. But since it’s a rare disease, many people don’t take the symptoms seriously to get themselves checked.
According to some statistics based on a study on cancer, nearly 2,470 cases of breast cancer in men are likely to get diagnosed by the end of 2017. This type of cancer carries a chance of one in one thousand among men in America.
Similar to any other cancers, male breast cancer too has four stages where its curable up till the second stage and involves brain, lungs, liver, and bone by the fourth stage making the illness fatal.
Breast size in men is smaller as compared to women and that makes it easy to diagnose cancer or tumor in male breasts, but the tumor can be confused with general stiffness of the chest. Men under 35 rarely suffer from breast cancer. It usually affects older men, but not always.
There are certain risk factors of cancer in male breasts that include breast cancer in a close female relative, consuming estrogen, exposure to radiation in the chest area, liver disease (if severe can cause breast cancer), and testicle disease(s).
The seriousness of breast cancer in men was thought to be higher as compared to breast cancer in women; however, it turned out to be the same in both cases. The only reason some considered it more fatal was because the symptoms of men breast cancer is not known or recognized easily. The hardness of the chest/breast in men makes it hard to recognize any dissimilar stiffness in case of tumor leading to ignorance towards the symptoms and reaching the later stage of male breast cancer.
Mammogram; breast ultrasound; MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of the breast; nipple discharge exam; biopsy: fine needle aspiration biopsy, core needle biopsy, surgical biopsy, lymph node biopsy, lymph node dissection, and sentinel lymph node biopsy are some of the exams done to examines and evaluate breast cancer or disease related to the breast.