Cancer

Breasts are normally regarded as being characteristic only for women. They are those feminine organs that are responsible for feeding the babies and, well, for making women sexy. But men have breasts, too. They are not as developed as those of women, but they are there, having the same structure, with a nipple and some breast tissue beneath the skin and the areola, too - that darker spot around the nipple. In fact until adolescence both boys and girls have very similar breasts and after that girls and boys differentiate because their bodies start the secretion of different hormones: the girls' body secrets estrogen and that leads to an increase in the breasts dimensions and the masculine hormone, testosterone, prevents them from growing.

Breast cancer in men is very similar with the same disease in women, but it is far more rare. Many people are not even aware of the fact that breast cancer can be a male disease , too and it does not affect only women. However, the causes of breast cancer in men can be a bit different and this happens because men normally have a different breast structure and also have different hormones in their body.



We already know that the feminine hormone, estrogen, has a strong effect on breast cancer and it contibutes to the growing of tumour. So any unbalance in the hormone levels in the man's body can be a cause of breast cancer. That leads us to the main risk factors, those agents that favour the breast cancer to appear and can be considered causes of breast cancer in men.

- The advanced age is not exactly a cause, but rather a risk factor and that is because the average age of male breast cancer patients is somewhere between 60 and 70 years old. The hormone changes in the male body that appear around this age - adropause - can be the factor that triggers the breast cancer.



- Medical history of breast cancer in the family - is an important cause, too. As you may know, all types of cancer can be transmitted from a generation to another, so the men who have more close relatives suffering from breast cancer, even though they are women, stand a good chance of developing this disease themselves.

- Radiation exposure can be a factor that makes breast cancer appear - if given in big quantities like in the case when the patient has suffered from some kind of cancer and has followed chest radiation.

- Liver disease - if the patient suffers from a serious liver cndition he has better chances of developing breast cancer because the liver is supposed to help with hormone metabolism and if it is sick, it can't do the job properly and hormone levels vary a lot, causing an increased level of estrogen, which leads to a higher risk of getting breast cancer.

- Treatment with estrogen - some men follow this type of treatment in order to slow down the prostate cancer for example. But this leads to an increased risk of breast cancer instead.

- Klinefelter's syndrome - this syndrome is rare, but it does affect 1 in 850 men. It is an unusual disease and it appears in the cases where men are born with two or more X chromosomes (the feminine chromosome) instead of having just one like all the other men. This causes them to have higher levels of estrogen and thus a higher risk of getting breast cancer.

Any way, even though you have one or more risk factors presented here, there are no guarantees that you will get breast cancer.