Men Get Breast Cancer, Where Is Their Detection Recommendation?

11/19/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
A recent study recommends that women start getting routine mammograms after the age of fifty. This has caused a great deal of uproar. Cynthia Nixon is a breast cancer survivor, and she is only forty three. However, it is not this recommendation that I want to discuss, but the lack of a particular recommendation that strikes me as odd. Why is there no recommendation for when men should get their breasts checked out?

Yes, men get breast cancer. Certainly men get it in smaller numbers than women do, but it is something that does happen. It even influenced an early episode of the series Family Guy where Louis Griffin discovers a lump in Peter’s breast. It turned out to be a fatty corpuscle, but, despite the humor of the episode, the reality is that men do get breast cancer. Yet, there is no guidelines on when a man should go into a doctor’s office to have his boobs pressed flat, folded and manipulated in order to find out if they have a lump in their breast. Alright, while a man getting a mammogram seems incredibly unlikely and even down right impossible, there is a serious lack of information and education regarding breast cancer in men.

Many people might find it hard to fathom the notion of men getting breast cancer, but there are 2000 confirmed cases of men getting it every year, and one in four of them die. Men are often more likely to be misdiagnosed with regards to breast cancer. Often times it is not caught until so late that it ends up being fatal. What is more, it may not be properly diagnosed even after it has hit the fatal stage. Breast cancer also changes as it spreads, which may make it harder to diagnose if not caught in the breast first. What it means is that, as understanding of the disease gets better, more men may be diagnosed with breast cancer per year than currently are.

It is a common institutional bias within both the political and medical establishment to view disorders and diseases as belonging to one group or another. With politicians it is an easy way of saying “hey, see, I support YOUR concerns” by throwing money into researching diseases and disorders that often strike many people outside the niche group. Within the medical establishment, it is a combination of different factors which make it appealing to simply box in disorders and diseases rather than investigate and educate as a whole.

It is this expediency, this institutional bias, which makes it all that much easier to throw the minority concerns under the train in order to get political results. It results in men dying of breast cancer, women dying of heart attacks, and straight men and women dying of AIDS related causes. It is an issue that comes up constantly, but is not often addressed or adequately resolved.

The John W. Nick Foundation has information regarding male breast cancer. As an additional note, not only is Kathleen Sebelius maintaining that women should still get their first mammogram at age 40, but many cancer physicians and societies as well.