Male breast cancer: is the scenario changing.
BACKGROUND
The overall incidence of male breast cancer is around 1% of all breast cancers and is on the rise. In this review we aim to present various aspects of male breast cancer with particular emphasis on incidence, risk factors, patho-physiology, treatment, prognostic factors, and outcome.


METHODS
Information on all aspects of male breast cancer was gathered from available relevant literature on male breast cancer from the MEDLINE database over the past 32 years from 1975 to 2007. Various reported studies were scrutinized for emerging evidence. Incidence data were also obtained from the IARC, Cancer Mondial database.


CONCLUSIONS
There is a scenario of rising incidence, particularly in urban US, Canada and UK. Even though more data on risk factors is emerging about this disease, more multi-institutional efforts to pool data with large randomized trials to show treatment and survival benefits are needed to support the existing vast emerging knowledge about the disease.
Department of Surgery, Oncology, Reproductive Medicine and Anaesthetics, Imperial College, London, UK. k.contractor@imperial.ac.uk
Kaiyumars B
KB
Contractor
Kanchan
K
Kaur
Gabriel S
GS
Rodrigues
Dhananjay M
DM
Kulkarni
Hemant
H
Singhal
D018567:Breast Neoplasms, Male / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000628:therapy; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D008297:Male