Word: breast
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Brian Place didn't think about breast cancer when he found a lump near his left nipple. He thought about rugby. The lump, he figured, might be an injury from colliding with another player...
Place's doctor didn't think much of the lump either, but recommended a mammogram nonetheless. After that came an ultrasound of the breast and a biopsy, and then, finally, a diagnosis: breast cancer. "I was completely numb," says Place, 41 at the time. "I let my colleagues know," he says - mostly men, as he's a communications technician for the Royal Air Force in Britain. "They were as dumbfounded as I was." Even at his local breast clinic, when Place would arrive, he says, some staff assumed he was accompanying a female patient...
...confusion is understandable. Only a tiny fraction of breast cancers diagnosed - less than 1% - occur in men. And because it happens so infrequently, much is still unknown about male breast cancer. "In women, we have studies based on hundreds of thousands of patients," says Dr. Larissa Korde, staff clinician at the National Cancer Institute's clinical genetics branch. For men, there are simply no studies of that scale. Though much can be extrapolated from research in women, Korde says, often "it's a little bit harder to make recommendations for men based on evidence...
Perhaps the surest risk factor - in both women and men - is family history. By the time Place was diagnosed, for example, two of his female relatives had died of breast cancer and a third of ovarian cancer. Although there are certainly several genes that contribute to breast cancer, mutations in two of them - BRCA1 and BRCA2 - are known to increase the odds of both breast and ovarian cancers. So while most men might never even meet a man with breast cancer, those who have several relatives diagnosed with it should be on the lookout for signs of their own breast...
...think that was the most embarrassing one as literally five minutes before I had to go out, someone ran out with my dress because, yeah, otherwise I would’ve been out there in pants.14.FM: You’ve done a lot of work to raise awareness about breast cancer; what are some of the projects you’re currently involved with?EH: I’m involved with a lot of charity projects, specifically breast cancer because my mom was diagnosed about 10 years ago. She’s in remission right now so it?...