Abstract
Purpose
Precise presurgical diagnosis of tumour size is essential for adequate treatment of male breast cancer (MBC). This study is aimed to compare the accuracy of clinical measurement (CE), ultrasound (US) and mammography (MG) for preoperative estimation of tumour size.
Methods
This study was conducted as a prospective, multicentre register study. One hundred and twenty-nine male patients with invasive breast cancer were included. CE, US and MG were performed in 107, 110 and 75 patients, respectively, and the estimated tumour size was compared with the histopathological (HP) tumour size.
Results
All methods tended to underestimate the HP tumour size. None of the methods were significantly more accurate than the others in determining the maximal tumour diameter. The sensitivity within 5 mm tolerance for US was 65.5%, which was better than for MG (61.3%) and CE (56.6%). In the group of patients with pT2 tumours, MG showed significantly better accuracy than US. The measurements obtained with each method were significantly correlated with the HP measurements. The highest correlation coefficient was observed for MG (0.788), followed by US (0.741) and CE (0.671).
Conclusions
Our data demonstrate that MG and US have similar accuracy with regard to tumour size estimation. US assessment showed the highest sensitivity in determining tumour size, followed by MG and CE. However, MG demonstrated a significant advantage for estimating the real tumour size for pT2 tumours compared to US or CE.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all teams involved in this project and especially Ms Lautenbach and Miss Rudolph for their help in collecting the data.
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We are grateful for the support of the study by the Warburg-Melchior-Olearius-Stiftung. M.M.Warburg & Co, Herr Dr. Olearius, Ferdinandstraße 75, 20095 Hamburg. (http://www.mmwarburggruppe.com/en)
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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Written informed consent was obtained from all patients before treatment. An additional individual consent for this analysis was not needed.
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Martin Streng and Atanas Ignatov contributed equally.
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Streng, M., Ignatov, A., Reinisch, M. et al. A comparison of tumour size measurements with palpation, ultrasound and mammography in male breast cancer: first results of the prospective register study. J Cancer Res Clin Oncol 144, 381–387 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-017-2554-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00432-017-2554-8