After making adjustments for year of diagnosis, age, cancer stage, and treatment modality, it appears that men have a markedly better five-year relative survival rate than women do when either gender is diagnosed with breast cancer.
This conclusion was reached according to the findings of researchers who carried out a population-based study that involved over 459,000 women and over 2,600 men diagnosed with breast cancer in the countries of Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, Finland and Denmark.
While the average age of women at diagnosis was around 62, the average age for men was closer to 70. Men were also found to have more advanced disease at the time of diagnosis than women.
These findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Diagnosis of breast cancer among men remains extremely low compared to the diagnosis in women. Whereas some 217,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed among women in the United States each year, the disease is diagnosed in only about 2,100 men in the country annually.
