BoomerGirl Diary

It is an area of personal health maintenance often ignored by men: breast self-examination.

So when Cameron Alden suffered a bruise on the right side of his chest after a planter box slipped from his hands it was no big deal. But the pain persisted, and he went to a doctor who diagnosed the injury as a cyst that needed to be drained.

Two years later, his breast cancer was discovered after surgery to remove a small lump in the same area as the cyst.

“I was embarrassed and full of self-pity,” said Alden, a Suffolk County, N.Y., legislator. “I thought I was going to die. My condition had been misdiagnosed. ... I had been an athlete all my life, been drafted as a professional athlete, so I couldn’t understand how I got a women’s disease.”

Almost two decades after his breast cancer diagnosis in November 1988, Alden is still on a mission to make more men aware that they may be at risk for the disease, rare in men but the second leading cause of cancer-related death in women behind lung cancer.

“There is a misconception that breast cancer is a female disease,” said Alden, 56, one of the speakers recently at a daylong conference at Adelphi University highlighting male breast cancer as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

However, “Men have a small amount of breast tissue, so ... they can develop breast cancer,” said Dr. Iuliana Shapira of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System.

Although the number of men with breast cancer is small compared with women, Shapira said, men’s cases have been inching up in the past decade.

In 2006, men will account for less than 1 percent of breast cancer cases, or an estimated 1,720 males will be diagnosed compared with 212,920 women, according to Lisa Daglian, senior director of media relations for the American Cancer Society. An estimated 460 men will die from the disease this year compared with 40,970 women, she said.

Shapira said male breast cancer is so rare that relatively little research had been done on it compared with women’s breast cancer. But lately, researchers have started to take more notice.

Breast cancer tends to be more advanced in men than in women when it is first detected because men are not routinely screened for the disease, Shapira said.

Dr. Stephanie Bernik, chief of breast surgery at St. Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center in Manhattan, said that men who have a family history of certain genes are at a higher risk.

“People seem to think that you only have to worry about family history of breast cancer on the mother’s side, but if a father has a history, it is just as important that they can carry the cancer gene as well,” Bernik said.

Male breast cancer should not be confused with gynecomastia, or the development of abnormally large breasts in men, Bernik said.

Treatment for male breast cancer is a mastectomy, removal of the breast tissue along with the nipple and the areola, which surrounds the nipple, Bernik said.

Bernik said that men need to be more persistent and not embarrassed about seeking care when it comes to their breasts.

“If a man happens to feel a breast mass in the shower, he certainly should bring it to the doctor’s attention,” she said.