Survival of male breast cancer patients: Population‐based cohort study

Abstract

Little information is available on the survival of male breast cancer patients because the disease is extremely rare in men. Moreover, previous reports on the prognosis of male breast cancer have been conflicting. We took advantage of a number of large, nationwide registries in Sweden to evaluate the prognostic value of sex in breast cancer patients. A population-based cohort of 269 male and 30 011 female breast cancer patients born after 1935 and diagnosed with primary breast cancer between 1970 and 1997 was generated by linking a number of Swedish registries, including the Swedish Cancer Registry, the Cause of Death Registry, the Swedish Generation Registry, and the Registry of Population and Population Changes. We used this cohort to quantify the association between the sex of the patient and breast cancer-specific mortality, using the Cox proportional hazards. The sex of the patient did not significantly influence the prognosis of breast cancer. Adjusting for age at diagnosis and calendar period did not alter the results. Nor did the results change when the analyses were repeated for all causes of morality. Our study, one of the largest to date, failed to find evidence to support the proposed association between the sex of breast cancer patients and survival. Given the previous reports, which advocated that male breast cancer patients have poorer survival and need aggressive treatment strategies, our findings are reassuring and clinically very important.

Treatment Outcomes for Male Breast Cancer: A Single-Centre Retrospective Case–Control Study

“…That decision is, in itself, an assumption and constitutes another possible limitation of this work. Our results add to the current evidence from population-based studies 1,[20][21][22][23] suggesting that sex is not prognostic for poor treatment outcomes in male bc. More recent studies suggest that male sex is a poor prognostic factor only in bc patients who are not provided with the best bc treatment.…”

“…Further examples in the literature have demonstrated that, with equal treatment, men and women have similar prognoses. A population cohort study from Sweden with 242 male patients and more than 30,011 female patients found no survival differences between the sexes 20 . A case-control population study from France that included 58 male patients and 116 female patients found no difference in dfs between the men and women 21 .…”

High-resolution genomic profiling of male breast cancer reveals differences hidden behind the similarities with female breast cancer

“…The survival of patients suffering from MBC, compared to patients suffering from FBC, is currently debated. Some studies have suggested higher mortality rates in MBC [12,13], while other studies claim that the mortality is similar to FBC when patients are matched for age and stage of disease [14,15]. Donegan et al [16] concluded that the poor prognosis is due to the older age of the patients at the time of diagnosis and that diagnosis is usually delayed.…”

Poorer breast cancer survival outcomes in males than females might be attributable to tumor subtype

“…Several studies have compared MBC and FBC and have found that MBC was not only associated with a worse prognosis but also showed more advanced stages and older ages at diagnosis, inappropriate staging, increased comorbidities, and more aggressive tumor biology [8–10]. Other studies have shown no association between MBC and survival and have suggested that patient sex does not influence mortality [11–13]. Thus, there is no consensus on the relationship between sex and prognosis in BC.…”