"Men with breast cancer don't do as well as women with breast cancer, and there are opportunities to improve that," said study author Dr. Jon Greif, a breast surgeon in San Francisco. "They were less likely to get the standard treatments that women get."

This study was presented yesterday at the American Society of Breast Surgeons annual meeting in Phoenix.
Greif and his colleagues compared about 13,000 men with breast cancer, identified from the National Cancer Data Base, to more than 1.4 million women with breast cancer. The data covered 1998 to 2007.

They found that women's overall five-year survival rate was 83 percent, but men's was 74 percent. That was looking at all breast cancers, whatever the stage.
When Greif's team looked at survival stage by stage, women with early stage cancer had better survival rates than men with early stage disease. The gap closed when men and women had more advanced disease.

They found also that men with breast cancer were more likely to be black than women with breast cancer (11.7 percent versus 9.9 percent).
In addition, men were older at diagnosis -- 63, on average, compared to 59 for women.
Men's tumors were larger when diagnosed; more advanced, spreading to other parts of the body and other differences, and men with breast cancer were less likely to get a partial mastectomy and to receive radiation, the study found.

"Women are encouraged to get breast exams [and] mammograms," Greif said. That is why their cancers are often diagnosed earlier, when the tumors are smaller, he said. More awareness of male breast cancer is crucial.
But Grief points out to a big limitation to the research: The database they drew from keeps track of which breast cancer patients die, but not what they died from. So it is impossible to tell if they died from their cancer or something else.

According to the American Cancer Society nearly 2,200 new cases of male breast cancer are expected this year,   with an estimation of  400 deaths of breast cancer in 2012 in the United States.