Love Health

< p>A few months after Ron Bush’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was rubbing the retired utility worker’s chest and found a lump around his right nipple. When she told him he should go get checked out for breast cancer, he remember saying, “Honey, what for? Men don’t have breasts.”

After getting a mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy, and eventually a lumpectomy, Bush knows for sure that men do have breasts—and they can get breast cancer, like he did.

The numbers are extraordinarily low—fewer than 2000 cases in all the United States last year, which is less than 1 percent of all new breast cancers total. But new research suggests that male breast cancer is on the rise. A new study published last week in Breast Cancer Research suggests that male breast cancer has gradually increased over the last 15 years.

The researchers, including pathologist Andrew Hanby of the University of Leeds in the U.K., thought they were seeing more cases of male breast cancer over the last few years. To confirm that this anecdotal evidence was a real phenomenon, they combed through data from England, Scotland, Canada, and Australia. The findings show a significant, though tiny, increase in male breast cancer cases. For example, in the U.K., the numbers rose from 0.4 cases per 100,000 men to 0.6. Similarly, they went up from 0.5 per 100,000 to 0.8 in Canada, our nearest neighbor.

Hanby notes that data wasn’t available from the U.S., but he has no reason to doubt that rates are probably going up here as well.

If you’re that rare man that gets breast cancer, how will you know? Hanby says that the symptoms in men are much like those in women: a lump or knot in the chest or underarm, puckering or retraction of the nipple, or nipple discharge. You might have any or all of these symptoms—and if you do, you should get checked out right away.

“Some evidence suggests that the prognosis for men is worse, and it might be partly because men leave stuff until it’s too late,” Hanby says.

Bush adds that he feels lucky he listened to his wife and got early treatment. “Most of the time we talk about our wives nagging us to death,” he says, “but I tell people that my wife nagged me to life.”