Breast cancer. Two words that every woman fears. Fortunately, in recent years, awareness of breast cancer has been on the rise, enabling women to become better informed, leading to early detection and treatment in many cases. But what few people realize is that breast cancer is not just a "woman's disease". Men can get breast cancer too. While only one percent of all cases of breast cancer is found in men, many are not even aware that they are candidates for breast cancer and it often goes undiagnosed as well as untreated. The mortality rate for men with breast cancer is high. Therefore, awareness of this disease is critical to both men and women.

Male breast cancer is similar to female breast cancer in diagnosis and treatment. However, due to the biological differences in men's breasts and women's breasts, the way the disease progresses is different. The adult male breast is similar to that of a preadolescent girl, consisting primarily of a few branching ducts lined by flattened cells surrounded by connective tissue. In girls, breasts continue to develop in response to hormones released during puberty. Since men do not have the breast mass that women have, the cancer can spread quickly to the chest cavity.

Men are susceptible to the same breast cancer variations as women, though some are extremely rare. For instance, lobular carcinomas are very rare in men, because men typically do not have lobules. Nearly all breast cancers, in men and women, are carcinomas. Infiltrating ductal carcinoma is the most common breast cancer in men, accounting for 73 percent of all cases. Men can develop Paget's disease and inflammatory carcinoma as well. Less common is the occurrence of various sarcomas.

Since so many people are unaware that men can even develop breast cancer, the earliest signs of detection are often missed or ignored. As with women, the first symptom is often a painless lump in the breast. Men are more likely than women to experience nipple discharge, which can sometimes be bloody, and signs of local spreading that include nipple retraction, fixation to the skin or underlying tissues and skin ulceration. An estimated fifty-percent of men with breast cancer have palpable axillary lymph nodes.

The smallness of the male breast should facilitate early diagnosis, however the size of the breast is often the reason the cancer spreads so rapidly. Without the mass of a typical woman's breasts, carcinomas in men lay closer to the skin above and to the tissues below it. The cancer can quickly progress to these systems before it is even detected. Men's tumors are usually centered around the areola, which can facilitate spreading the disease to the internal mammary pathways.

Men typically do not examine themselves for breast cancer, and rarely do their physicians. Typically, when men do discover signs of breast cancer, they delay alerting their physician, sometimes for months. This may be in part because men perceive the symptoms as a flaw in their masculinity and tend to ignore them.

Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate