Breast cancer mortality not improving in men
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Among men, breast cancer-specific mortality rates have not improved in the last 3 decades, according to research presented at ASCO 2021.
“Breast cancer mortality in women has declined significantly over the last several decades,” Jose Pablo Leone, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said during the presentation. “In men, however, it is unclear whether survival has changed over time.”
Leone and colleagues assess men diagnosed with breast cancer from 1988 to 2017 using information collected in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registry.
The study included 8,412 men. Researchers grouped men based on the year of their breast cancer diagnosis, with 1,033 patients in the 1988-1997 group, 2,938 patients in the 1997-2007 group and 4,441 patients in the 2008-2007 group.
Among all patients, the median age at diagnosis was 68 years in each group and in the overall study population.
Leone and colleagues found that breast cancer-specific survival at 5 years was 83.5% in the 1988-1997 group, 83.6% in the 1998-2007 group and 84.3% in the 2008-2017 group.
The researchers did not identify a significant difference in breast cancer-specific survival between each decade group in each stage of breast cancer.
Overall survival at 5 years, they found, was 64.7% in the 1988-1997 group, 67.2% in the 1998-2007 group, and 69.3% in the 2008-2017 group.
In multivariate analyses, the researchers determined worse breast cancer-specific survival was independently associated with factors including older age at diagnosis, being Black, having grade 3 disease, increasing breast cancer stage, HR– status and not having surgery.
Additionally, they determined that while there was no significant association with breast cancer-specific survival with each additional year (HR = 1.0; 95% CI, 0.99-1.01), overall survival significantly improved each year (HR = 0.99; 95% CI, 0.98-0.99).
“Over the past 3 decades, there has been no significant improvement in breast cancer-specific survival in male breast cancer,” Leone said. “The improvement in overall survival over time suggests increasing life expectancy.”
He added that “efforts to improve breast cancer-specific survival in male breast cancer are warranted.”
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