Male Breast Cancer

Your healthcare provider will ask about your symptoms, family history of breast cancer and other risk factors. They’ll perform various tests or procedures to make a diagnosis, including:

• Breast exam: Your healthcare provider will examine your breast tissue, checking for skin changes, lumps or other abnormalities.
• Imaging tests: Mammograms can detect the majority of male breast cancers. A mammogram is a low-dose X-ray that takes pictures of your breast tissue. Your provider may also perform an ultrasound. An ultrasound uses sound waves to take pictures of your breast tissue.
• Biopsy: Your healthcare provider will perform a biopsy to look for cancer cells in your breast tissue. For this procedure, your provider removes tissue from the tumor and sends it to a lab for testing.

Testing the cancer cells in a lab allows healthcare providers to diagnose cancer and plan treatments that work best on certain types of cancer cells.

With breast cancer, providers look for proteins on cancer cells called receptors. These proteins include estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and HER2/neu receptor. These cell features provide important information about what’s causing cancer cells to grow.

What are the stages of male breast cancer?

After diagnosing breast cancer, providers classify it using a process called staging. Staging uses information like tumor size and cancer spread to determine how advanced the disease is.

You may need imaging tests such as a PET scan, bone scan or CT scan that can show where cancer cells are inside your body. Your provider may perform a sentinel node biopsy as part of staging. For this procedure, your provider removes one or more lymph nodes near a tumor and tests them for cancer cells.

The stages of male breast cancer are:

Stage 0: Cancer cells are only in the ducts. Stage 0 breast cancer is another name for ductal carcinoma in situ.

Stage I: The tumor is small and hasn’t spread to your lymph nodes.

Stage II: One of these is true:

• The tumor is smaller than 20 millimeters (mm) and has spread to a few lymph nodes in your armpit (axillary lymph nodes).
• The tumor is 20 mm to 50 mm across and hasn’t spread to the axillary lymph nodes (stage IIA), or the tumor is 20 mm to 50 mm and has spread to the axillary lymph nodes (stage IIB).
• The tumor is larger than 50 mm and hasn’t spread to a few axillary lymph nodes.

Stage III: Cancer has spread to several lymph nodes. Cancer cells may also be in your chest wall or skin.

Stage IV: Cancer cells have spread to other parts of your body. Cancer can spread to all areas of your body, including your bones, lungs, liver or brain.