Father and Daughter Both Cope With Breast Cancer

June 16, 2006 — -- For Walter Crate, this is an especially happy Father's Day: Not only is he free of his breast cancer -- yes, that's right, breast cancer -- his adult daughter recently recovered from breast cancer surgery herself.

"I was blessed, I really was," he said.

While male breast cancer is uncommon, accounting for less than 1 percent of all breast cancers, it is a disease men need to know is possible and is often linked to one's genes, as was the case with Crate and his daughter.

The problem, said Dr. Marisa Weiss, a radiation oncologist in Philadelphia and founder of BreastCancer.org, is men think of breast cancer as a female disease, and as a result, they don't go to their doctors when they have a problem.

"Male breast cancer is not routinely screened for," said Dr. Judy Boughey, a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "This means men usually have a more advanced stage of breast cancer than women at the time of diagnosis. ... Their overall prognosis tends to be poorer than that of women."

However, "the sooner it's diagnosed the sooner it can be treated, and it's highly treatable when discovered early," said Weiss. According to the National Cancer Institute, there are approximately 1,500 new cases of male breast cancer in the United States every year, and 400 men die from it each year.

In some cases, breast cancer has a genetic link, and this appears especially true for male breast cancer, said Dr. Harry Bear of the Massey Cancer Center at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. As many as one in five male cases have a genetic cause, while only one in 20 female cases are genetic, he said.

"When you see a man diagnosed [with breast cancer], you should automatically think about genetic testing," said Lillie Shockney, a registered nurse and the administrative director of the Johns Hopkins Avon Foundation Breast Center in Baltimore. "Their probability of having a gene is high. Breast cancer can be passed down through the generations on the father's side just as equally as it can on the mother's side."