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Malignant tumours of the male breast in Finland. A report of 51 cases.

1969; Springer Nature; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/bjc.1969.60

1532-1827

P Peltokallio, T Kalima,

Breast Lesions and Carcinomas

MALIGNANT tumours of the male mammary gland are relatively rare.Men account only for about 1 per cent of breast cancer materials (Moss, 1965).Approximately 10 per cent of all tumours encountered in the male breast are malignant (Jaaskelainen, 1951).The percentage of men in the Egyptian breast cancer series reported by El-Gazayerli and Abdel-Aziz in 1963 was as high as 6.4, while in a Finnish material it was 0.3 (Peltokallio et al., 1969).The difference has been attributed to hyperoestrogenism caused by hepatic damage in bilharziasis.Male mammary cancer is typically a disease of old men; the age of occurrence is some 10 years higher than for women (Huggins and Taylor, 1955; Komurdjaev and Rogoznaya 1964).The clinical picture bears a good resemblance to that seen in women and the tumour tends to metastasise in the same sites and with the same frequency.Because of the paucity of glandular tissue the tumour is recognised more easily in men and spreads more rapidly into the surrounding tissues such as the skin and muscles.Malignant tumours of the male breast are so rare that it is difficult for an individual physician or clinic to obtain experience of them.For this reason, we collected the material from the whole country. MATERIALThe material consisted of all malignant tumours of the mammary gland diagnosed and histologically verified in Finland in 1952-63 (Finnish Cancer Register).The original case reports were all re-examined.A total of 51 malignant tumours of the mammary gland were diagnosed in Finland in these years.They were distributed as follows according to the histologic picture: carcinoma 42 cases, sarcoma 3 and malignant lymphoma 2 cases.In 4 cases the malignancy of the tumour was not histologically certain.The proportion of male patients in all cases of breast cancer in Finland during this period was 0.54 per cent.The annual morbidity was 0.19/100,000 men.Female breast cancer morbidity during the same years averaged 32.9/100,000 per annum (Fig. 2).Three to seven new cases of tumour of the male breast were established every year (Table I).We shall consider here only the 42 histologically definite cases of male breast cancer.The age distribution of the men is compared with the concomitant female age distribution in Fig. 1.Both the median and mean age of the material at the time of diagnosis was 66 years.The youngest patient was affected at the age of 41 and the oldest at 91.As many as 7 patients were over 80 (Fig. 1).