Abstract
Objective
The extremely low incidence of male breast cancer (MBC) leads to lack of prospective randomized phase III studies worldwide. Especially in China, all studies on Chinese patients with MBC were based on small sample size and single institute experience. The aim of this study was to provide overall view of characteristics of Chinese patients with MBC by means of summarizing all related papers published in Chinese journals.
Methods
An online search was made in CBM, VIP, CNKI, and CBA databases to find all published articles of interest on Chinese patients with MBC. And eight subjects including the proportion of MBC in all breast cancer, age, tumor location, clinical stages, pathological subtypes, treatment modalities, ER/PR expression, and 5-year survival rate were selected to calculate the proportion and their 95% interval confidence.
Results
There were 122 papers with 2584 patients enrolled. The basic features of Chinese patients with MBC included: (1) MBC only with a proportion of 1.06% of all the breast cancer; (2) The mean age at diagnosis was 57.6 years old; (3) Tumor mainly located in the areolar region (74.83%) with obvious nipple and/or skin involvement; (4) Nearly 62.62% patients were in early stage before accepting treatment; (5) Infiltrating ductal carcinoma accounted for 79.05% of all pathological subtypes; (6) ER/PR expression rate was 65.86%; (7) Radical resection was up to 86.06% in all surgical modalities; (8) The 5-year survival rate was 57.33%.
Conclusion
The results showed in this study were an overall view of Chinese patients with MBC whose characteristics were similar to that reported in the West. Though this study provided a little bit stronger confidence than a single study collected in this paper, studies with more powerful evidence are urgently demanding in China.
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Xia, L., Yuan, Z., Wang, X. et al. Characteristics of Chinese male patients with breast cancer: summary of the published papers. Chin. -Ger. J. Clin. Oncol. 9, 311–315 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10330-010-0620-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10330-010-0620-7