Male breast cancer: a retrospective analysis

Abstract

Background: To evaluate our results in the treatment of male breast cancer patients with respect to local control (LC), overall survival (OS) and possible prognosis factors for survival.

Patients and methods: Thirty-nine patients with male breast cancer have been retrospectively studied with the trial aim to evaluate the results of our practice. Among them, 94.8% had invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), 2.6% invasive papillary carcinoma (IPC) and 2.6% invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) and the distribution according to stage was found to be 12.8, 46.2, 30.7 and 10.3% in Stages I, II, III and IV, respectively. Among the patients, 7.7% received radiotherapy (RT) and hormonotherapy (HT), 22.8% received chemotherapy (CT), 61.8% received chemoradiotherapy (CRT) and HT and 7.7% received HT in addition to surgery.

Results: The distant metastases rate was 36% and the local recurrence rate was 5%. All the local recurrences and the distant metastases had occurred after the first two years. The five-year disease free survival (DFS) and OS rates were 65.8 and 80.1% respectively. In our series, univariate analysis for OS demonstrated statistical significance for lymph node metastases (p=0.00001), stage (p=0.0098) and age (p=0.03); while RT in the treatment modality (p=0.6849), and tumor size (p=0.4439) demonstrated no significance. The presence of lymph node metastases significantly impairs OS (p=0.004) and DFS (p=0.014) in multivariate analysis.

Conclusion: Postoperative radiotherapy was important in the management of male breast cancer to improve LC resulting in one local failure, but did not improve OS and DFS in our analysis. The presence of lymph node metastases significantly impaired OS and DFS.